Assuming of course you have an Xbox Series X/S to play on.

The confusion stems from a December 23rd tweet from the FortniteStatus twitter account that said the skin would be unavailable starting, uh, December 2024. Which weirdly meant that you would have been able to buy it for 23 days but you'd be forced to return it.

Anyway, vigilant users quickly noticed the error because, as Epic said back in 2020 when announcing Matte Black Master Chief as a skin, you'd be able to get it in Fortnite at any point in the future and there would be "no time limit for unlocking this style."

"We apologize for the confusion from our previous tweet saying it was no longer available," said Epic the next day. A Christmas Eve miracle, I guess. Or one more just-in-time victory for the one and only Master Chief. Or both. Anyone's guess at this point. Maybe the plot of Halo 7 will be MC trying to stay in Fortnite ala Wreck-It-Ralph.

"We're expecting some guests from Night City," Epic teased, and while no further details have been shared, it sure looks like both Johnny and V will be joining in on the fun.

As noted by Eurogamer, Johnny's arrival in Fortnite will be Keanu Reeves' second appearance in the game, having previously turned up several years ago as noted dog lover John Wick. Wick is known for more than just his deep affection for canines, but I find it a little amusing that despite such a vast difference in characters—Wick an assassin of focus, commitment, and sheer will, Silverhand a degenerate faded musician—it's actually Johnny who has the real body count. Silverhand, as you may recall, set off a suitcase nuke inside Arasaka Towers in 2023, instantly killing more than 12,000 people and leading to another 750,000 deaths in the months that followed.

I'm guessing that statistic won't come up in the context of Fortnite, but it would be extremely funny if the game's current season ended with Johnny vaporizing Seaport City. That's probably not going to happen either but I dare to dream. 

On the other hand, Fortnite leaker HypeX shared images of the Cyberpunk 2077 cosmetics coming to Fortnite, and included among them is what is 100% a nuclear warhead stuffed inside a gym bag. Make of that what you will.

Epic hasn't said when Johnny and V will appear in Fortnite, but I would expect it to happen very soon.

Word of the cursed collaboration came our way via a cryptic tweet posted earlier today, which quite frankly meant nothing to me. A toilet, a plunger, and a video camera might make for a good Sesame Street instructional, but as far as how it relates to Fornite I was entirely in the dark.

It was PC Gamer features producer Mollie Taylor, far hipper than I in matters of pop culture, who made the connection, which upon further investigation (because I am a professional) was confirmed by various Fortnite dataminers including HypeX and SpushFNBR. Skibidi Toilet is indeed coming to Fortnite in the form of a Plungerman skin, Skibidi Toilet back bling, and Plungerman's Plunger pickaxe, available for purchase individually or in a bundle.

There will also apparently be an emote, because sure, why not:

Skibidi Toilet, as I've been forced to learn, is a machinima series created with Source Filmmaker by Alexey Gerasimov and released on his DaFuq!?Boom! channel on YouTube. It is, according to Wikipedia, particularly popular with Generation Alpha—those born after the early 2010s—but it's also become a broader pop culture phenomenon: You can, for instance, buy a range of Skibidi Toilet merchandise from Walmart.

Interestingly, the response to the imminent skibidization of Fortnite is not universally positive. Reaction memes abound and some of them get a little grim, but this seems to sum up the emotion of the moment rather succinctly:

Some have also questioned whether Epic is asking for legal trouble from Valve by adding Skibidi Toilet to its game. The singing head from the debut episode of Gerasimov's series is actually the head of the Male_07 civilian character model from Half-Life 2. Valve might be cool with its assets being used in an unrelated video series, but I imagine it might have different feelings seeing it in someone else's game, especially when that "someone else" is doing its best to muscle in on Steam's turf. Then again, I can't imagine Epic would launch into a project like this without ensuring all the legal bases are covered. We shall see.

What I find most interesting about the whole thing (or maybe just amusing) is the timing. The reveal of Skibidi Toilet in Fortnite comes literally one day after Borderlands narrative director Sam Winkler said he would "cry real tears" if Borderlands 4 even contained the word "skibidi." Quite a thing to be told that your humor falls below a baseline set by Borderlands.

Despite the skepticism, I won't be at all surprised if the Skibidi Toilet crossover turns out to be a big moneymaker for Epic. The DaFuq!?Boom! channel currently has nearly 45 million subscribers, and the most recent episode, released four weeks ago, has drawn 27 million views so far. And in case you'd forgotten, Michael Bay is currently looking at bringing the "Skibidi Toilet multiverse" to television and movie screens. The naysayers are out in full force over this collaboration, but in the broader view, the strange tale that began with a head in a toilet remains massively popular.

At a briefing last week, Wargaming told us more about Steel Hunters. First of all, the suits of mechanized armor players control aren't "mechs in the traditional sense," as Wargaming put it—they're basically robots uploaded with a human consciousness. Wargaming just calls them hunters. While the distinction seems arbitrary, getting away from the word "mech" might be an effort to set expectations accordingly. Hunters aren't walking tanks with swivel points and guns for arms—they're humanoid or animal-like combatants, several of which hold weapons with hands and can punch stuff. More Gundam than Mechwarrior, basically.

Other key details:

• Free-to-play
• Two-player squads only
• Battle royale format with a late-game extraction point
• Quick matches, 8-15 mins
• Hunters are heroes: They have names, identities, and set roles
• 7 hunters available in the closed playtest
• Playtest runs from 12/12 to 12/22

That bit about heroes is important to understand if you're coming at this as a World of Tanks or Mechwarrior fan: Hunters have set roles, names, and limited variation in weapons. Of the handful of hunters that Wargaming showed off, one was a dedicated sniper with a cloaking ability, another was a beginner-friendly soldier with an assault rifle, and my personal favorite was an eight-legged spider mech with a shoulder-mounted minigun.

We didn't get to play Steel Hunters, but we watched a complete match play out. I haven't touched World of Tanks in a decade, but Steel Hunters is a faster game to my eye. Duos are encouraged to stay on the move, wiping out camps of NPC robots that drop shield upgrades or capturing towers that trigger significant advantages, like a tower that spots all enemies in a huge radius. That seems to be the flow of Steel Hunters' economical 8-15 minute matches—patrol the map and choose whether you want to passively collect upgrades or pick off other duos.

The time-to-kill is longer than traditional shooters and fights were largely out in the open, with hills, trees, and settlements partially obscuring hunters that stand up to eight meters tall. Hunters are more agile than WW2 tanks, but Wargaming is still bringing its signature "measured gameplay" to Steel Hunters. Weapons are accurate from a long distance and reloading can take ages, so knowing when to pick a fight or avoid one is major.

I asked Wargaming how Steel Hunter's monetization plan would compare to World of Tanks, which pushes players to pay for premium versions of tanks and advantageous consumables. Steel Hunters will be a more traditional live service game with cosmetics and a battle pass, but Wargaming isn't ruling anything out.

"To be honest with you, we're just revealing the game right now, so we're very focused on the core gameplay loop," Wargaming marketing director Laurent Lartisien said. "None of these things are set in stone. We're still fine-tuning a lot of that and collecting feedback from players, but these are our high-level plans.

"There is no scenario where there would be a premium advantage for now."

Hm, that "for now" is doing a lot of work. Well, they got me curious enough to give Steel Hunters a try. The playtest starts now, and you can sign up on the Steel Hunters Steam page.

Epic admitted its mistakes and agreed to pay a $275 million penalty for violating the COPPA rule (the largest penalty ever levied) as well as $245 million to refund consumers affected by Fortnite's "dark patterns and billing practices" (the largest refund amount ever in a videogame matter).

Two years down the line, the FTC has started sending out that money to customers. A new announcement says it's "sending refunds totaling more than $72 million to consumers who were tricked by Epic Games, maker of the popular video game Fortnite, into making unwanted purchases."

It doesn't mince words when recapping the reason for the penalties and refunds. The latter is to settle allegations that the publisher used "dark patterns to trick players into making unwanted purchases, let children rack up unauthorized charges without any parental involvement, and blocked some users who disputed unauthorized charges from accessing their purchased content." It goes on to say that these issues were compounded by confusing and "counterintuitive" interfaces and unclear charging practices.

This is obviously just part of the total $245 million and the FTC calls it the "first round of payments" with more to be made at a "later date." It even breaks down the $72 million, which is being sent out as 629,344 total payments, split roughly equally between PayPal payments and cheques, with the average payout being $114. Yep, turns out the government doesn't accept payment in V-Bucks.

The FTC has a dedicated email address for anyone wondering about their refund, which is amusingly enough admin@fortniterefund.com, and customers who believe they may be eligible for a refund can submit a claim on a dedicated part of the FTC website. You have to be over 18 and either:

• You were charged in-game currency for items you didn’t want between January 2017 and September 2022
• Your child made charges to your credit card without your knowledge between January 2017 and November 2018
• Your account was locked between January 2017 and September 2022 after you complained to your credit card company about wrongful charges

You can read more about the original settlement agreement here.

The trouble came to light yesterday when players discovered that Epic had apparently made a change to the XP cap on Save the World, the original Fortnite PvE experience. Fortnite Save the World is pretty much an afterthought at this point, long ago left in the dust of Fortnite Battle Royale, but players can still use it to earn progress in Fortnite overall. As Forbes explains, players could previously earn multiple levels per day from playing Save the World, but with the start of Chapter 6 Season 1, it was cut to a total of nine levels per week, a drastic reduction.

This did not go over well with the Fortnite community. Multiple threads on the Fortnite subreddit were highly critical of the change, complaining that the tighter cap unfairly impinges upon their progress. Many felt the change was part of a more forceful push to monetize the Fortnite battle pass, and there was also considerable upset that all of this happened without any warning: Epic said nothing at all about the new XP cap prior to pushing it live.

Now it has said something, and it turns out the Save the World XP issue is a bug. "We're aware of an issue where after a certain threshold is reached, Save The World players earn less XP than intended," Epic posted on X. "We're working to resolve this now and will let you know when a fix is live."

It looks like this might have been part of a broader problem with Fortnite, as XP awards in Lego Fortnite were also disabled because of a problem with how it was being handed out. The Lego Fortnite Status account said all XP that would have been earned during the period that awards are disabled will be granted at some point before the current Lego pass ends.

All of this may have emerged from a change to Fortnite's overall XP reward system that was announced in October. Rather than having separate daily quests for each mode, as of December 1 the regular battle pass, the music pass, and the Lego pass all share reward tracks and advance with XP earned from any Fortnite mode except Save the World. This hasn't proven entirely popular either, as some players say the merging of daily rewards has cut back on the amount of XP they can earn and forced them to play game modes they're not interested in, but at least it's not a bug.

"As the wind blows, the sun rises on a beautiful new island, shrouded in mystery and mystical energy," an Epic Games blog post says. "In its darkest corners, demons dwell, wreaking havoc with their masks of chaotic power. Great heroes must rise to drive back the ancient evils that roam this land. Become a ronin and cut through the darkness to find the light in Fortnite Battle Royale."

The new locations will introduce cherry blossoms, spiritual forces, timeworn magic everything you need to make a name for yourself as a killer demon hunter. Some of the best places to check out this Saturday include Warrior's Watch, Flooded Frogs, and Shogun's Solitude. There's also a more modern place to visit, Seaport City, which is full of tall buildings, narrow alleyways, and hidden gaps, the perfect place to test out all the new movement mechanics.

"Chapter 6 adds Ledge Jump, Roll Landing, Wall Kick, and Wall Scramble to the core movement of Fortnite," the blog post says. "These new movement features will be universally applied across Battle Royale, Reload, and Creator-made islands."

It's actually surprising that Fortnite has only just introduced these movement features. For a game that is so fast-paced and where mobility is key, new ways to traverse the map feel like an absolute must. But maybe that's just because I play too much Kiriko in Overwatch 2, so wall climbing feels like a no-brainer.

Other than clambering up walls with Wall Scramble, players will also be able to use Ledge Jump to catapult themselves further than usual, Wall Kick to jump off walls in whichever direction they want, and Roll Landing, which will keep momentum and restore some stamina when hitting the ground. These features mean that fights are going to become a lot faster in Fortnite and will probably introduce a new skill gap between those you can scurry away from a bad encounter in less than a second and those you cannot.

While the new movement mechanics are probably the feature that I'm most excited about, I couldn't miss out on talking about the upcoming Godzilla skin. "The legends are true," the blog post says. "Become a true Titan as Godzilla! The Godzilla Evolved Outfit will be available from Battle Pass Quests in January, which you can complete in any experience! This Battle Pass will be available to progress in until February 21 at 2 am ET (11 pm PT/ 7 am GMT)."

There have already been a couple of leaked videos showing what Godzilla will be capable of in Fortnite. Here's a hint: it's mostly just dancing. You can see Godzilla doing the Get Griddy emote here, or if you want to see something slightly more upsetting, then I'd recommend checking out this video showing Godzilla doing the Celebrate Me dance while wearing Jordans. Fortnite's upcoming season is really shaping up to be something unforgettable, no doubt.

"The Game Awards Vote in Fortnite, which debuted last year, has been refreshed with a batch of new Islands to check out and vote for, an Arena in which to test your combat prowess, and a slick new host: the one and only MetaHuman Geoff Keighley," an Epic Games blog post says. "This year’s digital Keighley is clearly much improved over 2023’s version. Where last year’s hologram look was created using greenscreen video capture, this year’s makes use of MetaHuman to deliver a more realistic depiction."

MetaHuman technology aims to allow anyone to create realistic human models in Unreal Engine 5: "MetaHuman is a complete framework that gives anyone the power to create, animate, and use highly realistic digital human characters in any way imaginable." It doesn't just happen instantaneously, mind you.

"I saw Epic’s announcement of MetaHumans in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) earlier this year and thought it would be incredible to see what was possible around The Game Awards," Keighley says. "I spent a full day at 3Lateral in Manchester, England, to get scanned as a MetaHuman. You sit in a scanner and do tons of different face poses. Then they scan your body too. The results speak for themselves. I truly feel like I have a digital double!"

The model of Keighley does look impressive, but it's not the first time The Game Awards host has been scanned into a video game. Death Stranding had numerous cameos featuring the likenesses of various gaming and cinematic celebrities, including Keighley, who appeared as the Luden Fan.

I'm not sure which model is better, although I will say that to my untrained eye, they both look pretty similar. But Keighley's model in Fortnite will probably do much more than just hover over the ground talking at a player, so I guess we'll have to wait and see if all that time getting scanned for The Game Awards vote was worth it.

If you don't want to tune into The Game Awards 2024 via Fortnite, you can watch it on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok Live, or other social media sites on December 12 in the US and December 13 in the UK.

Supervive was the second most played Steam Next Fest demo back in October, beaten only by Delta Force, and now it's out on Steam in early access, attracting nearly 30,000 concurrent players at its peak so far today.

The free-to-play game is a genre mashup that its creators are calling "MOBA battle royale meets hero shooter"—think MOBA-style perspective and controls, but rather than marching down lanes you're dropping onto a battle royale map in two or four-player teams. There's a MOBA-style PvE aspect here as well, as aside from other players, you'll find minions and "Meteor Bosses" to fight on the map.

We came away from our first Supervive playtest feeling surprised by its depth, and during Next Fest, Harvey praised its Blizzard-style polish—the studio behind the game, called Theorycraft, was founded by former Riot and Blizzard developers, which is pretty unmissable once you see the Overwatch-like character designs.

Launching a new competitive multiplayer game has to be nerve-racking regardless of how experienced and confident you are—we've seen just how badly things can go this year—but the good response to Supervive's demo seems to have genuinely been telling. Positive user reviews are rolling in on Steam, and its Twitch viewership isn't bad either, with about 48,000 people watching at the time of writing.

Supervive's battle royale mode can currently be played in duos or four-player squads, but a solos version is also teased on the Steam page as a "special game mode event"—it isn't available at the outset as far as I can tell. Supervive also includes a 4v4 deathmatch mode and a practice mode right now.

Theorycraft plans to keep Supervive in early access for six months to a year.

"We plan on removing the Early Access label when we've polished our art, environment, and UI up to 'launch' quality, added more metagame progression, smoothed out any emergent gameplay issues, and acted on major community feedback along the way," the studio says on its Steam page.

Real heads will know that the true OG Fortnite is "a game about PvE base-building, and killing zombies, and watching cutscenes, and grinding for color-coded epics and legendaries in high-level zones."

But that's not what Fortnite OG is: Originally a limited-time event that ran last year, it's a return to Fortnite battle royale as it existed at the moment Epic pivoted from the original game to launch the mode that now rules the world.

"OG is coming BACK and is here to stay," the big announcement says. "Relive Battle Royale from the start and explore the OG map, collect OG loot, and relive OG seasons. Drop back in on December 6."

Also, this guy is excited:

Maybe the most notable part of all that OG-ing are the words "here to stay." Epic brought back Fortnite OG in November 2023 and it was a resounding success, pulling in more than 6.1 million concurrent players at one point. But that was a limited-time event—this new trip back to the future will apparently stay on tap permanently.

Returning to the old ways seems to be something of a trend for major live-service games these days. Apex Legends recently returned to its roots with the Launch Royale limited-time mode, while Overwatch brought back its 2016 heroes and maps in the Overwatch: Classic LTM. As usual, PUBG beat them both to the punch, redeploying its original Erangel map back in April. But Epic's been rolling with some throwback Fortnite for a while now too: It's currently in the midst of Chapter 2 Remix, "with weekly location and loot drops inspired by the best of early Chapter 2 gameplay." That's set to run until November 30.

"The openness of the Linux operating systems makes it an attractive one for cheaters and cheat developers," the Apex anticheat team wrote in an update explaining its decision.

"Linux cheats are indeed harder to detect and the data shows that they are growing at a rate that requires an outsized level of focus and attention from the team for a relatively small platform. There are also cases in which cheats for the Windows OS get emulated as if it's on Linux in order to increase the difficulty of detection and prevention."

Cutting off an entire branch of players is no small thing, but the anticheat team said it had to balance the "greater health" of the overall Apex player base with the number of legitimate players on Linux. "While the population of Linux users is small, their impact infected a fair amount of players’ games," it wrote.

As a result, effectively immediately Apex will no longer be playable on Linux-based systems, including the Steam Deck. Apex Legends on Steam had previously been categorized as "playable" on the Steam Deck, meaning it "may require some manual tweaking by the user to play," but it is now listed as "unsupported."

The update doesn't get into the nuts and bolts of why Linux is such a popular vector for cheating, or why cheats on Linux are so hard to detect, but it seems to come down to kernel mode anticheats being easy to work around in the Linux environment. "There is currently no reliable way for us to differentiate a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious cheat claiming to be a Steam Deck (via Linux)," the anticheat team wrote.

Those concerns have been echoed, and elaborated on, by others: In an April blog post about its Vanguard anticheat, for instance, Riot Games said "Linux does not currently afford us sufficient ability to attest boot state or kernel modules, and the difficulty in securing it is only compounded by all the frustrating differences between distributions."

"Even allowing emulation is an exceptionally dangerous game, as many cheats could then just run on the host, manipulating or analyzing the VM in a way that would be invisible to Vanguard within it," Riot wrote.

"Half of anti-cheat is making sure the environment hasn't been tampered with, and this is extremely hard on Linux by design. Any backdoors we leave open for it are ones developers will immediately leverage for cheats, and yesterday, there were just over 800 Linux users on League. We have evaluated this risk to not be worth the payoff."

The reaction to the news on the Apex Legends subreddit is largely restrained: Some users are naturally upset or angry, but others seem to feel the decision is justified. "Staying on a more closed [Windows] environment to protect the game by sacrificing such a small % of gamers is a deal I'm ready to make, especially for more competitive games," redditor BetterProphet5585 wrote.

The big question is what sort of impact this will have on cheating in Apex Legends going forward, and several players have called on EA to share before/after numbers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the move, or lack thereof as the case may be; some are also no doubt hoping for a walkback if blocking Linux players proves to have little or no effect. For now, though, it's a done deal: If you want to keep playing Apex Legends on your Steam Deck, you're going to have to install windows.

"Apex Legends launched with significantly more new features for casual and seasoned players alike, including more modes, a new map, and new anti-cheat software," EA CEO Andrew Wilson says. "Following changes to the battle pass construct, we did not see the lift in monetization we had expected."

EA doesn't go into detail about how much money the overhauled battle pass ended up bringing in, but at the end of the day all that matters is that it didn't earn as much money as was apparently expected of it.

"Two things have become clear in the free-to-play FPS category," Wilson says. "First, in a competitive landscape where brand, a strong core player base, and high-quality mechanics matter more than ever, Apex has proven to be a compelling franchise for us and an industry stalwart. Second, to drive significant growth and re-engagement, large systematic change is required. We will continue to focus on retention and breadth of content in service of our global community as we work toward more significant, innovative changes in the future."

Understandably, many Apex Legends players aren't overjoyed to hear that "large systematic change" will be coming their way, in part because Apex Legends already got an "improved" (and very unpopular) battle pass structure in July: It introduced two 60 tier battle passes per season, essentially splitting the old 110 tier battle pass into two, and a change to the premium battle pass which meant that tracks could only be purchased with real money (this was later reversed).

"Time to recolour the recolours and do a triple split on the battle pass," one player says. "It's the perfect plan!"

But it's not all just about the battle pass, there's also the issue of a stagnating player base.

"As we look forward, we have adjusted the rest of FY '25 to reflect lower engagement than expected versus our prior guidance," executive vice president and CFO Stuart Canfield says. "As Andrew mentioned, we are committed to delivering new experiences for our players, with a continued focus on enhancing player engagement and retention."

Difficulty attracting and keeping new players does seem to be a legitimate concern.. "It's just tough to get new players in," another player says. "I couldn't get any of my friends to try more than 20 minutes because of how fast they die to high-level seasoned players."

I can speak from experience that jumping back into a game after leaving it for some time only to get trounced on by seasoned players, is not fun and does not inspire me to persevere on and get better at a game when there are so many other FPS games I'm actually good at. That may be a weak mindset to have, but I'm only human.

I've long wondered what the modern-day equivalent of the famous Nixon/Kennedy TV debate would be, a technological leap from radio to television that was the first of its kind. Nixon—all clammy and weird—was comprehensively trounced by the slick, telegenic Kennedy, possibly determining the outcome of the entire election.

We have our answer: presidential Fortnite maps. Kamala Harris—current vice president and possible future president—has launched her own zone in Fortnite called Freedom Town, USA (via IGN). You can check it out yourself by using the code 733155366547 (catchy) in Fortnite Creative.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Harris won't be using the map to challenge Donald Trump to a 1v1 duel, nor is she showing off her rich collection of Rick and Morty skins. She's… talking about politics. You can learn about tax breaks and affordable housing. You know, the stuff you come to Fortnite for.

On top of the Fortnite Harris zone, the Democratic campaign will also be festooning a whole bunch of other Creative-mode maps with political ads and what-have-you. IGN's tireless reporter notes that at least one of them includes a clip of Donald Trump saying "they're eating the dogs, eating the cats" in his famously composed and reserved manner of speech.

All of which makes me feel about 253 years old, but let's be honest: This is nothing new and it's only going to get more widespread and weird from here. We're all getting old, and the generation that grew up not just playing videogames—but watching them—are now of an appropriate age to become campaign staffers, pitching candidates like Harris on ideas about reaching the young male vote through, well, videogames. That's why you can catch Kamala in Fortnite, Tim Walz playing Crazy Taxi, and—god help us—Donald Trump streaming alongside Adin Ross.

My only question, really, is whether Fortnite is the right game. The following is purely vibes-based speculation on my part, but I've always associated Epic's battle royale with players who are, well, too young to vote. Gen Alpha and the like. If she really wants to light a fire under a load of decrepit millennials and zoomers, she'd better get to making a Skyrim mod or something.

Over the past seven years, Fortnite has established itself as the premiere home of videogame crossovers. DC, Naruto, Star Wars, Family Guy, Street Fighter, Ferrari, Balenciaga, the NBA, Lady Gaga… the list goes on. Fortnite has had crossovers with some of the biggest brands and pop culture phenomena of our time—in what other game could Alan Wake ride Shenron into battle against Davy Jones? It would be naive to suggest that they haven’t contributed hugely to its success.

But Fortnite is, of course, far from the only game to do crossovers. Overwatch 2, for example, has featured Cowboy Bebop and K-pop group Le Sserafim, while Apex Legends has also teamed up with Star Wars and Naruto, and Destiny 2 has included content based on Ghostbusters, D&D, and more. None of these games has managed to come close to Fortnite's level of success with these kinds of events, however—so what's the secret that makes its crossovers make such a bigger splash?

Let's use Overwatch 2 as an example of the difference in approach. Right now, it has a crossover running with My Hero Academia. This includes a few skin bundles and some challenges you can complete to unlock unique sprays. Ignoring the fact that only one of these skin bundles would set you back more than $20 worth of in-game currency, this is about as surface-level as a crossover can get. There are no unique changes to the game, meaning the only way to participate in the event if you aren’t willing to fork out for the skins is to complete the event challenges. Unfortunately, all of these challenges simply require you to play a certain number of matches, so engaging with the event essentially boils down to playing the game exactly as you would normally.

Fortnite also added some My Hero Academia skins to the game during Chapter 4 Season 1 back in 2022 (and not to harp on about Overwatch too much, but they were a bit cheaper than $20). But while the cosmetics were there for those who wanted them, this event went far beyond just skins. It included a unique weapon, the Deku Smash, taken straight out of the anime, and a fully new map with its own minigame was added, with a set of unique challenges to complete to earn rewards.

Imagine you have never played Fortnite or Overwatch 2, and a crossover event for your favourite franchise begins in both games. Are you going to play the one with minimal content and a few skins, or the one with themed weapons, maps and minigames, almost all of which you can access free of charge? What Epic Games gets right that so many other developers don't is that these crossovers are more than just a couple of references slapped into the game for existing players—they offer things substantial enough to be worth downloading the game for.

Fortnite's current season isn't just made for Fortnite players who happen to like Marvel—it's made for Fortnite fans and Marvel fans alike. Regular Fortnite players get the benefit of new maps, weapons, and bosses to fight, while Marvel enthusiasts are offered a new way to experience their favourite series. Whether you joined two weeks ago to try out Captain America’s shield, or two years ago for the Kamehameha, there's something exciting there for you. It's a constant stream of reasons for people to return to the game or try it for the first time.

The only other game that seems to come close to matching it is Dead by Daylight. As in Fortnite, its crossovers have been so much more than just a couple of skins, with each new chapter adding new Killers, Survivors and maps often drawn from classic horror series. When you play as Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head, it's not just a stock character with a skin on—you’re playing a wholly unique Killer with their own unique abilities. Again, whether you’re a fan of Dead by Daylight or a fan of Silent Hill, there’s something to love here, because it appeals to both sides of the aisle.

In both games, it speaks to a much greater willingness to let the guest franchise be the star of the show—knowing that ultimately the game around it will benefit. In Fortnite's case, the developer seems happy to make space for almost any crossover if it thinks people will be excited, and it can be really astonishing how effective it is. When Metallica was featured in Fortnite Festival earlier this year, for example, I saw clips on social media of middle-aged metalheads trying out the game, just because their favourite band was playing a couple of virtual shows—how many other games can boast that kind of reach?

Admittedly this might be a little harsh on the competition. Games like Overwatch have a firmer sense of lore and theme. Where Fortnite can play fast and loose with its world, for most other games it isn't quite so simple. Throwing a random Spider-Man-themed map into the mix would risk diluting the game's setting and upsetting die-hard fans.

And while Fortnite's formula is free for all to see, emulating it directly is certainly easier said than done. Epic is a juggernaut to compete with, flush with resources and with the connections and momentum to secure any crossover it likes.

I'm sure there are many more reasons that hold other developers back, too. But ultimately there is a simple difference of attitude, here. Where so many games seem to see crossovers as an afterthought, Fortnite embraced them wholeheartedly, and while its sheer success may be impossible to match, I don't think that means there's nothing to be learned from it—or that other developers can't grab a bigger slice of the pie by applying those lessons.

Whether you like it or not, franchises are a powerful tool these days, to say the least. People are ride or die for their favourite series, and they crave new content for it. Epic Games is all too happy to provide that, where others seem to hold back. By going above and beyond to create crossover events that are packed with truly engaging new content, made all the more interesting by how it fits into the world and mechanics of Fortnite, it's hit upon a golden formula. If other games want to follow suit, the blueprints are there—just throwing a few skins into the game simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Supervive, as part of Steam Next Fest, has opened its doors for a week—making it available to play until October 21 with matchmaking servers in Europe, North America, and Asia. Formerly known as Project Loki, it's an effort by Theorycraft, a studio of former devs from Riot and Blizzard, to carve out its own little nook of the MOBA market—and boy howdy does it show.

I've played a little already and, being experienced enough in MOBAs to know that I'm about 500 hours off a proper critical take of this thing (they are complicated games), I'm honestly impressed by what I've seen so far. Its character designs, visuals, and animations are all polished to a mirror sheen—such a recognisable blend of art styles between Riot and Blizzard that it's almost uncanny, and superbly animated. One look of these characters absolutely makes me feel 'yep, that's an Overwatch', for good or for ill.

It's making an effort to keep the battle royale formula—something I'm not really a fan of—fast paced and action heavy. You can knock out about five-to-six matches in an hour, depending on how quickly you get wrecked.

Supervive plays in the space that Battlerite—a game I'm still grieving after it (ironically) tried to do a battle royale version and fell on its face—left in my heart. In fact, I'm feeling a bit of the same malaise here. I much preferred Battlerite's arena mode, and while Supervive does have a 4v4 brawl, it's clearly not the main focus.

Like Battlerite, Supervive's combat takes your usual MOBA team fights and makes them pure skillshot flex-offs. The major difference here is the inclusion of a jump button, which allows you to scale ledges and, if you double-tap it, glide across chasms. If you get hit while you're gliding, you get punished—either by being spiked into the ground or, if there's no ground to get spiked into, dying. This means fleeing an engagement by island-hopping is innately risky. Overall, this game's got movement and jukes a-plenty.

Matches follow the standard battle royale beats. Your job is to kill creeps, unlock vaults, and establish bases while staying inside an ever-shrinking storm—there's a big variety of objectives here. You can go to specific nodes called Oracles see where team fights are, you can visit respawn beacons to revive your whole team from a distance (though you also alert others to your presence), there's a train with a bunch of loot on it doing laps, and matches all have unique modifiers. Theorycraft gives players reasons to bump into each other and keep things grooving.

Encounters with enemy duos and teams are wild, frenetic, and will take a few dozen hours before you're familiar with the game to actually know what's going on. This is less of a complaint and more just how the genre works—Supervive clearly has a rich and textured metagame going on with room for plays.

In terms of how it all controls? Swimmingly. It's rare to play a game that's this frictionless this early on in development—in fact, it's almost a bit much. Supervive flows so smoothly it feels downright slippery at times, like you're trying to wrestle control of a ferrari over an ice field. It's a game for the kind of play-making, twitch-decision wunderkinds who appear on League of Legends highlight reels.

This really comes into focus when a new player, like myself, is trying to wrap my brain around the battle royale/MOBA elements at play. There are items and, presumably, a meta-game, but I'm not really sure where I'd have time to soak any of it in outside of hitting the books, forums, or YouTube guides. There's a smart loot button that lets you snag all the upgrade items from your fallen enemies, but it's all extremely intimidating. It doesn't help that actually looking at what an item does is a bit finickity, given your mouse also swings the camera around.

The front-loaded complexity of a MOBA marries with the battle royale shtick in the same way it always does—a blaring mess of information that'll give you a headache if you don't take your time with it. If this all sounds like criticism, it sort of is—as it stands, the game doesn't do a super job at teaching much of anything, bar a scant few tutorials—but that's just a hallmark of the genre. To gripe too much about it would be like walking into a high-tier strategy game and going 'there's a lot of menus here, then!'

I'm mostly just here to let you know what you're in for. If you're the kind of person who relishes in the rampant chaos of your average high-level MOBA matches—if you like making pro gamer plays and styling on your enemies—Supervive has already got that in spades; it's exactly your kind of freak. There's a supremely complex and octane-filled game already here, and it's doing exactly what it sets out to do with a dab-hand professional flourish.

As regular Fortnite players know, creators are already using camera trickery to "fake" janky first-person views to often good effect, but this official implementation goes further.

"Workarounds, begone", Epic's blog post on the feature begins. "The new First Person Camera Mode device enables you to create polished first-person experiences rendered from the player character’s viewpoint!"

Epic hopes Fortnite creators will use the tool to make modes in "popular genres like first-person, team-based or tactical shooter games, or add new levels of immersion into horror and cinematic adventure games."

The first-person module is currently "experimental," so folks aren't allowed to publish anything that uses it yet. I can see why after messing with it this week: first-person Fortnite is promising, but it's very early. As Epic warns, most guns don't have first-person reload animations yet, so your arms just disappear off-screen during the process. The first-person animations that do exist look pretty good, and the shooting isn't bad either. You can sprint, jump, and aim-down-sights like you'd expect.

Fortnite first-person module - Experimental"

You can see where Epic is probably going with this: Once the feature is ready for prime time, I imagine "First-person Battle Royale" will be an official Fortnite playlist right next to Zero Build and standard BR, and if it proves popular, it'll be there to stay.

But I wonder what constitutes popular enough to support first-person mode indefinitely. It's clear from Epic's blog post that supporting first-person is a manual process—new animations have to be made for new guns and tools going forward. I wonder if that's a task the studio wants to hoist on itself, like how it's now dedicated to creating Lego and Fall Guys versions of regular Fortnite skins. I do know that if this new way of playing Fortnite is gonna catch on, it'll need more TLC. Even with custom animations, first-person Fortnite still feels more like a mod than a full-fledged FPS. Gun skins and character arms don't look great close up (since they weren't designed for that), the forced FOV is a little claustrophobic, and the scale of Fortnite's environments looks strange from a different viewpoint.

The first-person Fortnite module is available now to try in private islands and UEFN. Players will be able to publish levels in first-person when the module enters beta later this year.

On X, users reacted to the crossover by declaring open season on Fortnite Cybertruck drivers, with players making a general commitment to focus fire on the detestable polygon as soon as they see it—all other targets be damned.

It's not just Fortnite players expressing Cybertruck discontent. Some of Fortnite's own developers have shared their frustration with seeing Tesla's infamous truck/icon of excess in the game. Making sure to clarify that their opinions are their own, Fortnite producers Robby Williams and Kyle Wynn made their Cybertruck stances clear: "Destroy on sight."

Does prioritizing Cybertruck users count as cyberbullying? It might. But when a car's earned a reputation for being a three-ton mass of mechanical failures and public safety hazards with a 70-grand price tag, I can't help but feel that some amount of backlash is inevitable if you put it in your videogame.

Amidst the general lust for Cybertruck destruction, X users have been sharing other observations about the crossover, taking time to wonder how Elon Musk might feel about his very special truck being driven by Fishstick—a Fortnite character who's been hinted as being in a relationship with fellow Fortnite skin Doggo, in what historians might call a "very close friendship." Others, unfortunately, have taken Fishstick implied Cybertruck endorsement as a bitter betrayal.

Elsewhere, on Reddit, users have theorized that driving the Cybertruck in Fortnite doesn't just put you inside a big, goofy shape—it might put you at a competitive disadvantage, with its massive windshield offering less protection than Fortnite's other vehicles.

the cybertruck isn't just an ugly car - it's actually a straight downgrade to the normal car! let me elaborate a bit. from r/FortNiteBR

We'll have to wait and see whether Cybertrucks will actually earn more in-game aggression. Initially, the Cybertruck skin will only be obtainable by completing nine quests in the Summer Road Trip event that began on July 23. Only one quest unlocks each day, making July 31 the earliest that players can expect to see a Cybertruck in-game. The quests will remain active until August 6, after which players who want Fortnite's Cybertruck skin will have to buy it with V-Bucks in what might safely be called the greatest self-own offered by contemporary gaming.

So it has gone for Apex Legends, which today reversed the most unpopular aspect of the new battle pass structure it announced two weeks ago.

The changes were controversial for a couple reasons. The first complaint was that Apex will now get two smaller battle passes per season instead of one, effectively doubling the cost of each season's premium tiers. That isn't changing. The second complaint—the bit that is being reversed—was that premium battle pass tracks were no longer going to be obtainable with Apex Coins, a currency that can be earned in the battle passes themselves. Instead, direct $10 USD transactions were going to be the only way to unlock those premium tiers.

Today, Respawn announced that it's scrapping the USD-only part of the plan. Premium battle pass tracks will continue to be obtainable by spending 950 Apex Coins. Since those premium tracks include 1,300 Apex Coins, players who complete a premium battle pass track will be able to use their AC to unlock the next one.

There will still be new real money-only battle pass tiers, which are now called Ultimate tiers. The basic $10 Ultimate tier will include extra Apex Packs and Crafting Metals as instant unlocks, but won't contain cosmetics you can't get in the regular Premium tier that can be unlocked with AC.

The change that isn't being reversed—the splitting of each season's battle pass into two—wasn't as unanimously unpopular as the Apex Coins change. It's true that having two 60-tier battle passes per season instead of a single 110-tier battle pass means players have to spend more to unlock roughly the same number of tiers, but in theory they'll get more good things for their trouble. Respawn said that it's cutting out rarely equipped items, and that both of a season's battle passes will include the same kinds of high-value items (eg, legendary skins) that appeared in the highest tiers of one of the old season-long passes.

In an interview with IGN, Apex game director Steven Ferreira said that the two-per-season change was made because a lot of players weren't finishing the season-long battle passes. The idea is that "you can still unlock the equivalent amount of cool content and stuff, but you can do it inside of 45 days," he said. "And you get a faster and a better pacing and cadence of engagement with the Battle Pass over 45 days versus 90."

Respawn also acknowledged a tertiary complaint, that it appeared to be fiddling with monetization rather than taking care of issues players cared about.

"Your priorities are our priorities: cheaters, game stability, and quality of life update are top of mind," said the studio in its announcement. "We need to get better and it's why we're acknowledging them here."

Respawn promises we'll see "a number of improvements and game stability bug fixes'' next month when Season 22 starts. Those changes will be described in patch notes to be published on August 5, the day before the start of the season on August 6.

The Cybertruck's looming incursion was presaged with a grim omen yesterday, when the Fortnite X account posted a teaser image showing a fragment of the Cybertruck logo. Today, the collaboration got a full reveal with a short trailer, showing that Fortnite fish guy towing a bunch of junk before his tow chain snaps, sending his Cybertruck speeding down a road that's missing the people you might expect to see pointing and jeering when a Cybertruck drives by.

We won't know how true-to-life the skin is until it's drivable in-game. Will Fortnite's Cybertruck carry the same risk of falling apart while jumping a sand dune? Or visibly rust if it suffers a light misting of Chug Jug juice? Will your player character also suffer lacerations if they bump up against the tailgate a bit funny?

Considering you can pay for the skin, probably not. It's not like a company would sell you a truck knowing it's liable to fall to pieces. But at the end of the day, Fornite's a game where Batman uses assault rifles without complaint—it's not terribly concerned with faithful portrayals.

As a carnival of corporate branding, there's nothing sacred about Fortnite, even if seeing Goku hit the Griddy evokes something close to a religious awe. But something feels sacrilegious about forcing him to share space with a real, actual vehicle that—since it started hitting streets in November 2023—has already generated three real, actual recalls over potentially lethal faults.

If you're wondering how public sentiment is responding to the incoming shapemobile, declarations that it's every Fortnite player's "civic duty" to destroy Cybertrucks on sight have already been retweeted thousands of times. Simultaneous with its Fortnite crossover, the Cybertruck is also coming to Rocket League, where I suspect it'll be doing a lot of detonating. Just a gut feeling. 

We reported last week how players were resorting to review bombing to vent their frustrations with the Apex Legends' new monetization scheme, which boils down to "Now there are two battle passes and you can't pay for either of them with in-game currency." Today, that bombing campaign continues unabated, with the free-to-play shooter racking up almost 30,000 negative Steam reviews in the last week alone.

The recent Steam review rating for Apex Legends currently sits at an uncomfortable "Overwhelmingly Negative." While the overall rating remains a respectable "Mostly Positive," only 15% of the reviews from the last 30 days have been favorable. And the rate of review bombing hasn't slowed much either: At time of writing, players have left over 4,400 negative reviews in the last 24 hours.

Unsurprisingly, the most common complaints echoed throughout the wave of negative reviews are related to the battle pass changes. One reviewer asks, "Titanfall 2 had to die for this battlepass money grab bs?" Another says that they've "played from the first season and never had a break," but after 2,650 hours of play time "this might be the end of this journey."

Recent successes from similar review bombing efforts have demonstrated how nuking a game's Steam rating can be a surprisingly powerful lever for players to pull. The Helldivers PC community managed to review its way out of having to sign up for Sony's planned mandatory PSN accounts, while TF2 fans successfully pressured Valve into anti-bot bans with the power of public sentiment. Of course, others—like the Shadow of the Erdtree difficulty complaints—didn't seem to achieve much more than a public admission that a lot of people weren't collecting their scadutree fragments.

And yet, while reading my way through the backlash, I can't help but wonder how many times EA is going to shoot itself directly in the foot with this particular gun. Maybe someone in the boardroom was nostalgic for the public shaming earned with Battlefront 2's microtransactions. 

Respawn announced this week that Apex will now get two short battle passes per season instead of one long one. Whether that part of the news is strictly a bad thing is debatable: Respawn says the new 60-tier half-season passes will still contain the same number of legendary skins as the old 110-tier passes, but with less filler. 

What is obviously bad for players, however, is that they can no longer save up the Apex Coins they earn from battle passes and use them to unlock the premium tiers in future passes. The premium tracks will now require direct payment of $9.99 USD to unlock, no substituting in-game currency.

The only reasonable explanation for that change is the obvious one—that someone thinks Apex can make more money this way—so the announcement's claim that it adds "value" for players feels a bit patronizing. (I suppose it probably isn't marketing best practice to say 'we're doing this to make more money,' but I for one would've appreciated the honesty.)

Apex players are now expressing their dissatisfaction using the standard method: dumping negative Steam reviews on the game. The battle royale shooter has accrued over 1,300 negative reviews so far today, dropping its recent review score average to "Mixed."

A number of players have framed the battle pass change as the straw that broke the camel's back, citing cheaters, bugs, server issues, and balancing disagreements as their other grievances. "Now with the new battle pass system, I'm deleting the game, as well as most players, bye," wrote one Steam reviewer. The Apex Legends subreddit is looking just as dire: one of the top posts right now declares, "I uninstalled!"

There hasn't actually been an immediate dip in Apex's player count: The free-to-play shooter is one of the most popular games on Steam, with a peak of over 240,000 concurrent players today. And complaints about matchmaking, cheating, bugs, and monetization decisions are hardly unique to Apex—every big live service game faces some combination of those criticisms. 

It's more than slightly premature to start declaring Apex a dead game, in other words, but that hyperbolic rallying cry does get the message across: People really don't like being asked to spend money where they previously didn't have to.

It isn't uncommon for publishers and developers to backpedal after an announcement sees this sort of backlash, so it's not a sure thing that EA and Respawn will see it through. If they do, the first half-season battle pass will come with the start of Season 22 in August—find more details on the changes here.

Here are the two biggest changes:

• There'll now be two 60-tier battle passes per season instead of one 110-tier pass
• Premium battle pass tracks will only be purchasable with real money

So, instead of spending 950 Apex Coins (approximately $9.99, but alternatively earned by playing) on each season's premium battle pass track, players are now invited to spend $9.99 cash per "half season" premium battle pass track. A $19.99 Premium+ track has also been introduced for each half season battle pass, replacing the old premium bundle.

What makes this nouveau structure better, according to Respawn, is that it'll be easier to get the most desirable items in each of the smaller half-season passes. Their 60 tiers will still include the same number of legendary skins as the old season-long passes, with a Reactive weapon skin at the top tier, plus more Crafting Metals and Apex Packs. Meanwhile, items that weren't seeing much use, such as weapon charms, will appear less frequently.

"We've seen the numbers, and things need to be more approachable and realistic for our global player community," said the developer. "Each of these updated aspects allows us to make the Battle Pass more attainable and valuable for your time and money."

A player who purchases a half-season battle pass premium track should therefore get as much for their money as they did with one of the old season-long passes, but faster and with less filler. Meanwhile, players on the free track will now get twice as many Apex Coins and Apex Packs per season (because there are now two battle passes per season), as well as a small assortment of epic skins each half-season.

It's not all bad—I like the idea of cutting out filler items—but removing the option to pay for the premium track with Apex Coins obliterated any possibility of a cheerful reception. It doesn't help that Respawn's explanation for that part of the change isn't very coherent. The blog post says that switching to real money will "up the value" of the premium tracks, but you'd have to be a supernaturally-skilled rhetorician to make anyone believe that. Since Apex Coins earned in the battle pass can no longer be used to unlock future premium battle pass tracks, I'd say their value has been seriously reduced.

It's also worth noting that more battle passes per season also means players have less time to finish them. The new 60-tier setup makes them quicker to complete, but compressing a three-month window into six weeks changes Apex's FOMO formula. Now if you buy a pass, you better be sure you're going to be playing a lot of Apex over the next few weeks, because the next one is just around the corner.

Already, one player has laid out a protest plan on the Apex subreddit. The top responses are skeptical that such a boycott will accomplish anything—the specter of that one Modern Warfare 2 "boycott" screenshot always hangs over these things—but it speaks to the level of affront some players are feeling. The titles of other rising posts in the subreddit include "Alright guys I'm out," "Farewell Apex, it was fun while it lasted," and "Is Apex Dying?"

The first half-season battle pass will launch with Apex Legends Season 22 in August. To promote the new format, its premium track will be free for players who complete "a set of challenges within the first two weeks."

After leaving Bungie in late 2012, Tung joined Riot Games to work on League of Legends, which gave him his first experience of working in the world of free-to-play live service games. When he left Riot in 2020 to found Theorycraft Games, he knew he wanted to create a free-to-play live service game because he believes "the games as a service model is so much better for developers and players."

"I always felt like in the $60 boxed product model that I was having to make decisions that were not in the best interest of players," said Tung. "It was in the best interest of, how do we sell as many copies in the first 48 hours as we can? One of the huge strengths of the games as a service model is you can be long term, you can think long term in terms of what is best for the player, and how does that overlap with what is best for the company? I think it allows you to make much, much, much better decisions overall."

When asked for a specific example of one of these non-player friendly decisions, Tung recalled the days of E3 press conferences and the demos that came with them. While not directly saying that the E3 showcases for any of the games he worked on could be categorized this way, he said that a lot of E3 builds for games featured things that would never be in the final released product. 

"I would wager that any developer who has ever worked in the $60 box product model, up until the point where E3 was cancelled, has a story about the E3 build," said Tung. "It's like, let's jam as much bullshit vaporware into the build as we can in the next three months because we have to have a huge showing at E3 because it's our one opportunity to talk to our audience before we launch the game.

"I would have to wager that some hugely significant percentage of those E3 efforts ended up on the cutting room floor because they were half-baked and caused people to crunch and really have to make huge sacrifices to get it in. But I bet a bunch have never even made it into the game because of the way that you develop those things. So that's my favourite example of hugely impactful decisions that were not about what is best for the player."

There is also a third path which has been getting attention lately. Helldivers 2 has been held up this year as a successful example of the middle ground between the free-to-play model and the $60 or $70 game—the hit co-op shooter costs $40. Sony is taking the same approach with upcoming PvP hero shooter Concord. 

With Supervive, Tung says the goal is to build a live service game that you can play for 10,000 hours over the course of years. I'm 9996 hours away from being able to tell you if that's realistic, but given its solid foundation I wouldn't be surprised if some players rack up that total eventually. 

Supervive has grown to become much more than a LoL game mode, however, and the only real similarities now are the look and the selection of characters with MOBA-style abilities. I tried it during a recent hands-on session, and it's closer to a fast-paced top down hero shooter, where you compete as a team or solo against 39 other players in a battle royale. You'll pick where to drop, kill creeps to level up and collect gear, then go hunt other teams to take them out and be the last one standing.

"In the beginning the game looked and played like much more of a traditional MOBA," says Tung. "18 months in, or somewhere in that timeframe, we let players play it and they told us unilaterally that the game was too slow. So that's the closest thing to a reboot we had on the project, we took the game offline for a period of months and rebooted the sandbox from top to bottom. Now the game I think doesn't really share that much DNA with the MOBA genre, certainly relative to where it was prior to that moment. Now, the game feels much more like an action game." 

Supervive has moved away from some MOBA elements and as someone with thousands of hours across League, Dota and countless other MOBAs, it was difficult to unlearn things I expected to happen. You move your character with WASD and aim your basic attacks and some abilities with the mouse, so there is no way to control the camera. When I played as a backline glass cannon, it was initially annoying that my camera was almost always centred on me, when I wanted to be watching the front line of the fight to see what opportunities I could take.

When I moved over to playing tanky frontliners, including my guy Kingpin who is basically a version of Dota's Pudge or Overwatch's Roadhog, I finally started to feel slightly useful. Throwing out a massive hook and then smashing whoever got caught with my close range stun was satisfying, and obvious enough that I could pick out the impact my abilities were having. 

But Supervive has the same issues MOBAs have when it comes to understanding what is going on in a fight, and after four hours I'm still struggling to read every ability that goes off. Even when my team did well, winning a game and placing top three in the next two, I struggled to know what impact I was having outside of the most obvious abilities hitting, and it was near impossible to track if my basic attacks were connecting. But this took hundreds if not thousands of hours in Dota and LoL to pick up, so I expect the learning curve to be similar, if somewhat reduced due to the smaller roster. 

While the fighting does resemble a MOBA with guns, the rest of Supervive is very un-MOBA like. The map is massive and made up of lots of floating islands, with gaps between different areas. You can fly across these gaps with your glider, which is an incredibly satisfying way of moving around, but if you take damage while gliding over a gap you get spiked, dying instantly, in what is already seen as an insulting way to kill someone. Spiking someone is one of those hype moments that really make you feel good and I expect will become the highlight reel plays for Supervive. 

"For a long time we were trying to figure out how you solve the problem of movement," said Tung. "You've got a top down camera and you need to have a sizable world to make the battle royale work, but running through the world with a top down camera, especially with the sort of MOBA movement model is not engaging, it feels slow and not fun. [But] gliding works now and we sidestepped around that whole set of problems around traversal not feeling great."

Then there's Supervive's revive system, which has a massive impact on the game. Until the final few fights where the battle royale circle forces you together, running away when a fight is going badly is the strategy to employ. If a squad member goes down, or even if your team is forced to split up too much, the best strategy is never a hero play to win the fight. It's to run the hell away and find a revive station. Standing on it will alert nearby enemies, but if you can fill up the progress bar your entire team respawns and you are back in the game. 

This influences every decision you make. There is always the question of if running is the best option and sneaking away after your team has fallen can be very satisfying. However, the flip side is that a single death from your squad can be punishing and often the best play is for the rest to turn tail and run. This means that sometimes fights turn into long distance poke-fests with each team trying to land one ability to get the advantage.

I expect, when things open up to more players, this will become the meta and the epic multi-team fights I experienced will be a rarity as there is too much risk involved. I hope I'm wrong, because dancing around on the edge of ability ranges hoping an enemy steps in the wrong place isn't all that fun, whereas jumping in and causing chaos is. 

The four hours I got with Supervive is nowhere near enough to offer up any definitive statements (sign-ups are open for a playtest that'll start later this month), but I genuinely do believe this could be another 10,000 hour game, as the dev team likes to claim it will be, because of the complexity. There's a lot of potential depth and so much to master that even after four hours I feel like I know very little and am still a complete beginner. 

The foundation feels strong, fighting is inherently fun when it finally kicks off, the battle royale system works surprisingly well and, most importantly, I want to play more. It's too early to tell for sure, but this could end up as one of the big competitive live service games of the future. It is a bad name though.

The image of the Brotherhood of Steel power armor helmet is unmistakable, while the emojis in the body of the tweet are a little more subtle but still clearly a play on the famous image of a winking, thumbs-up Vault Boy.

There's no indication as to what sort of Fallout stuff the crossover will include, but there's plenty to choose from: Power armor is an obvious choice, along with the famous blue and yellow Vault jumpsuits and surely some form of Vault Boy implementation. Post-nuclear map features also seem like a good bet. And maybe some Ink Spots?

It's been almost 10 years since the last mainline Fallout game, Fallout 4, but the series has been riding high in recent weeks thanks to the hit series on Amazon, which became one of its most-watched shows ever and sparked an across-the-board resurgence for the Fallout games. Given that, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some show-specific items as well—a Walton Goggins Ghoul skin is definitely one I'd wear. In the game, I mean.

Whatever's coming, we'll no doubt be hearing more about it soon: As noted by IGN, Fortnite's in-game news feed said Chapter 5 Season 3 is set to go live "courtesy of the Brotherhood of Steel" on May 24.

Let's just dive face-first into it.

"FORTNITE WOULDN'T BE SO FUCKING EMBARRASSING IF THEY MADE LOBBIES WHERE PEOPLE WITH ACTUAL AIM SKILLS AND FPS EXPERIENCE DIDN'T DEAL WITH LOSERS USING FUCKING WATER BENDING AND CHAINS OF HADES."

Chains of Hades is an epic melee weapon introduced in the ongoing Chapter 5 Season 2 of Fortnite that does multi-stage damage to enemies and can also be used to pull items and other players toward the user. It is, by all reports (very much including the one above) pretty OP. Water Bending is a mythic item that enables users to fire powerful ice projectiles at other players, and also has a healing ability. 

Water bending is also, according to Doja Cat,

"A FUCKING CRUTCH YOU ARE NOT GOOD AT THE GAME BECAUSE OF WATER BENDING, I WOULD BECOME SEVERELY DEPRESSED IF I HAD TO RELY ON ANY OF THESE STUPID NON FUCKING WEAPONS."

Somewhat oddly, another pair of tweets in which Doja Cat recommended that Epic remove Chains of Hades from Fortnite because people who use them are, let me see here... oh yes, "dumb cunts," has been deleted. Perhaps she decided the language was a little salty.

In any event.

I don't know if she's right or wrong, nor am I clear what sort of authority she brings to the table in matters of game design: To be perfectly honest, until today I assumed Doja Cat was some sort of anime nonsense. But as Eurogamer notes, her Fortnite bona fides are legit. Clips of her music appear in the game, and she references it in her song Agora Hills, singing, "We fuck too good when the bean kicks in—like Fortnite, I'ma need your skin."

Okay then. 

Doja Cat's appraisal does seem to have sparked a debate: Plenty of people seem to agree with her assessment, but others take issue, saying that water bending in particular requires skill—just a different kind of skill—to be used effectively. The marketplace of ideas in action! Or whatever's going on here:

For the record, Doja Cat doesn't take issue with all the new mythic items in Fortnite's current season. In response to a complaint about the Thunderbolt of Zeus she tweeted, "thunderbolt is fine," and she's okay with the Wings of Icarus too.

He has also been banished to a digital Fortnite purgatory for crimes against game engines, a most severe offence by any metric. Banned from Fortnite, Yoda is—turning into green spaghetti, Yoda did. Alright, I'm going to steer away from the wrinkly little guy's vernacular or I'm never going to finish writing this.

Added to the shop during the May 4 Star Wars crossover event, several items were. Kriff, I'm doing it again. These included a little Yoda you could wear as a backpack for 1,000 V-bucks, culminating in maybe one of my favourite images on the internet. 

As highlighted by a one iFireMonkey on Twitter, Yoda has been sent to the dungeon because—and you might want to prepare your brain for this sentence—"if you do the Zoidberg Scuttle emote while wearing the Yoda backbling, there is a high chance that you will crash your game." 

As demonstrated below, Yoda briefly turns into reams of horrifying green spaghetti at the sight of a lobster dance, something we can all relate to:

This was later confirmed to be an issue on the Fortnite Status Twitter account, which reads: "Due to an issue that may have been causing crashes for some players, we’ve temporarily disabled the Yoda Back Bling while the team is working on a fix. We’ve also removed Yoda, Disassembled C-3PO, and Dagobah Luke from the Shop." 

Disassembled here is an adjective, not a verb—the C-3PO cosmetic is literally a disassembled droid—though the idea that Epic Games took apart dear C-3PO piece-by-piece for collaborating with Yoda is helping me persist through the horrors.

Epic hasn't given any word on when Yoda will be freed from his infernal prison, but considering this is a primo battle pass item with a major crossover, I can't imagine Star Wars enthusiasts will be waiting long.  

Paco has spent 12 days adding different characters and items from Fortnite to a classic landscape painting of a crooked bridge and a quiet stream that he found at a thrift shop. It looks like he's finally finished with his project, so the last video showcased a quick explainer of everything he changed in the painting and why he did it. 

After sharing his idea on the internet a couple of weeks ago, he received "thousands of suggestions" about the project. "I tried to pick and choose what I thought were the most popular requests," Paco says in the TikTok. These include the Loot Llama and a barrel full of fishing poles. But adding your favourite characters and items from Fortnite isn't as straightforward as you may think. 

@artbypacoway

♬ original sound - Paco

"I'm basing my details off of details from the game, but I'm also challenging myself to make sure that these additions feel natural, like they belong in this original painting," he says in the TikTok. "So, during this entire process, I'm paying attention to the saturation of my colours and how blurry or refined my details are. The original artist was using these factors to create distance, and I want to do my best to match the original artist's hand."

It's incredible just how well everything fits together, the end product actually looks like a scene pulled straight from a game of Fortnite. Even the cartoonish character Peely looks at home in this painting. Although he does have some bruising and browning which helps with the realistic and rugged look. After completing the painting with some graffiti on the bridge to make it look like the Rave Cave, a sniper glare, a supply drop, and the remains of a build fight, the project was complete.

Within minutes of uploading the painting to his website, it was sold, but if you like the look of this Fortnite landscape, you may still be able to snag one of the 100 signed prints that are also on offer. But they are $100 each, so it's probably not the cheapest bit of Fortnite memorabilia on the market, even if it does look amazing.

An Apex Legends trailer released this past week shows off what to expect in Season 21, Upheaval, when it drops this week on 7 May. The trailer shows off Alter, the first evil character to get added in quite a few years, and the new 

New Legend Alter is one of those cackling, clever, cutting evil people who delights in destruction for destruction's sake, given her behavior in the trailer. She seems like she'd say something mean to you on your birthday, of all days. Terrible.

Perhaps more seriously, the trailer shows off her suite of abilities: Gift from the Rift, which grabs items from deathboxes at a distance, Void Damage, which lets you crack open a portal to move through walls and floors, and ultimate Void Nexus, which lets anyone on her team pop open a one-way portal trip back to a specific location. Perfect for quick escapes or surprise ambushes.

Season 21 also features a return bout with solos mode in Solos Takeover, which lets you grind through enemies on an Outlands map filled with pre-kitted out weapons and attachments, as well as battle sense to know when enemies are nearby. It'll also have auto-heal and Second Chance mechanics. Solos Takeover will replace duos mode from the beginning of the season until June 24.

The Upheaval map update will also tweak Broken Moon, pushing it into outer space  and adding a bunch of new points of interest to check out and fight over. It features a new ultra-condensed and very dense map center, but some of the more scattered points have been given a lot of love to tweak sight lines and what cover is open versus what areas are safe to move in.

You can learn more about Apex Legends Season 21: Upheaval on the quite pretty Apex Legends website made for just that purpose.

This may sound fun, and it is, but it's also a real pain to play against. People with the airbending mythic are faster than you, can jump into the air with ease, and just have pretty great overall mobility. It not only makes them a difficult target to hit but can also transform you into a sitting duck pretty quickly, as there's no way to get them out of the sky (except by shooting, of course). 

To stress just how annoying this new mythic has become in the later stages of the game, one player decided to try and capture their experience. Reddit user mnkymnk posted a short video which just involved loads of people using the air wheel to whip around the map quickly. At the very end, when the zone had shrunk down, a handful of players were left, with each one using the airbending mythic to try to outmaneuver their enemies. 

While everyone was on equal footing in this battle, I can only imagine how frustrating it would have been to make it to the final few, only to find that everyone was faster than you and able to launch themselves into the sky. But with all of those players zipping around, it's probably hard enough to make it to the final few, let alone win. 

Other players have decided that the best course of action would be for Epic [Games] to add the Chains of Hades tool back into Fortnite. "Please put the Chains Of Hades back in the game before this event ends I’m begging you, Epic…Just one time I need to pull one of these people out of the hamster wheel and do what needs to be done," one Reddit user says. 

The Chains of Hades would certainly even things out, if only to make players think twice before shrouding themselves in a whirlwind of air. Unfortunately, the likelihood of this happening is pretty slim, as the Avatar event is set to end on May 3. With not a lot of time left on the clock, Epic Games will probably choose to sit this one out, no matter how annoying players are finding it.

You'll be able to jump back into OG Erangel, after live server maintenance, from May 14 to May 28, which leaves plenty of time to walk back down memory lane. A couple of things you can expect to see again include foggy and rainy weather, as well as the bench weapons on the starting island. 

But it doesn't just stop at looks. The old map will also be bringing back the old UI and some mechanics. "Upon entering Erangel Classic, you'll be greeted by the familiar sight of a vintage world map and minimap, the match start timer, and the charmingly tacky font and graphics. It's a nostalgic journey that transports you to the past," the blog post reads. 

There'll also be a slight change to firearms, with the team introducing reduced recoil in an attempt to replicate the old recoil. While this is a cool touch, it probably doesn't make as much sense as changing the UI or the look of Erangel. The recoil was updated for a reason and is what plenty of players are used to now. It probably won't cause too much pain, but it's still a bit of a hassle and one that some players aren't happy to see. 

"I think this is terrible, tbh. The old look and feel, fine. But changing mechanics of recoil and enemy downing from one map to another just completely throws off any skill consistency players have managed to obtain over the years," one player says in reply to the announcement on Twitter. 

Other than this detail, everything else seems to be pretty non-abrasive, with many players happy to see the classic map make a return. If you haven't secured a chicken dinner in a while, then it may be fun to jump back into the map that started it all and see if you still have what it takes. 

Before its battle royale mode changed the landscape, however, Fortnite was a humble co-op game with some building elements. Considering how much more relevant it is in a post-battle royale mode, you'd be forgiven for thinking its transition was a masterstroke of marketing genius. Turns out, it was cooked up in the back of an Uber.

As reported in an interview with Game File (thanks, Kotaku), the game's former CCO Donald Mustard reveals that the plan to go battle royale was decided on very suddenly off the back of PUBG runaway success in 2017.

"The four of us were in the back of an Uber in California," Mustard says, describing a car ride with Tim Sweeney, Paul Meegan, and Kim Libreri. Mustard reveals that: "in that car, we decided. We’re like: 'We’re doing it, we’re going to re-task the team, we’re going to put it in Fortnite, we’re going to make a battle royale.'"

Considering how many studios would try—and fail—to make a battle royale mode in the years that followed, it's oddly reassuring to hear that Fortnite's own take was also ad-hoc. Mustard says he and his team had "like, three hours" to come up with a design document, which he started work on right there in the back of the car: "A school bus is going by us in traffic, and I’m like: Players are going to be on a bus in the sky and we’re going to jump out of it."

Yes, major design elements for one of the decade's most popular games were chosen via the design equivalent of I-spy. And no-one can deny it worked. 

Fortnite managed to buy-in to the battle royale gold rush in a way that saw it overtake PUBG—and now it's doing extensive partnerships with Lego. It's also become a user creation platform ala Roblox, concerning opinions on lowering age barriers notwithstanding.

Anyway, the next time you're worried that you aren't good enough to do X, Y, or Z, you can remember Fortnite's stratospheric success spawned from a design document cooked up in under three hours. Depending on your outlook, that's either inspiring, or a crushing realisation that financial and commercial success is just a roll of the dice. Your battle bus mileage may vary.

The new "See Confrontational Emotes" option will give players the ability to select whether or not they want to see "certain emotes that are sometimes used in confrontational ways," Epic said. Players who toggle them off will see other players using the offending emotes simply standing still, and there will be no emote sound.

The setting will apply to four emotes:

• Laugh It Up
• Take the L
• Whipcrack
• Make It Plantain

The default setting will make the emotes visible only from friends in your party, but can be set so the emotes are seen when used by any player, or switched off completely. It does not have any impact on your ability to use emotes.

"We want emotes to be a source of good vibes, but a few (*cough* Take the L *cough*) can sometimes feel a bit overly confrontational," Epic said on Twitter, and I think that's a fair assessment. I'm not a big emote user myself (which is a nice way of saying I can never remember the required key combos) but I do know that these things can sometimes be used in a belittling fashion, even gestures and emotes that aren't inherently offensive. 

It's one thing to take a little trash-talking from friends, but another thing entirely when an abrasive stranger is doing this in your face all goddamn day long:

Some people responding to Epic's tweet are critical of the move, taking a predictable "if you can't stand the heat" attitude toward an effort to make games less toxic (and of course posting the "Take the L" emote). Others point out that it's a toggle, not a deletion: Anyone who wants to see these emotes in all their glory is still fully free to do so. It's simply a way to make the experience less crappy and frustrating for those who don't enjoy the "I'm better than you" theatrics.

It brings to mind our discussion many years ago about teabagging, the classic pre-emote display of shooter dominance. Most of us thought it was stupid to varying degrees, but senior editor Wes Fenlon was spot-on when he noted that "there's a reason trash talk and teabagging have stayed around for so long, other than the fact that a lot of people are assholes: they can be effective." The former point is just as valid as the latter, and honestly sometimes you're just not in the mood to deal with it. Soon, in Fortnite at least, you won't have to.

The "See Confrontational Emotes" toggle will be added to Fortnite in the 29.30 update, set to go live on April 23. 

Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle originally released back in 2020 as a Stadia exclusive, and seemed to have died with Google's gaming platform. But you can't keep a good Pac-Man down. He's been chewing his way out of Stadia's corpse ever since. Renamed Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs, the battle royale-inspired multiplayer version of the arcade maze game will be arriving on Steam in May.

In Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle, 64 competing Pac-Mans are placed in 64 connected mazes, which they can travel between via the tunnels that normally loop you back to the other side of the screen. In those mazes you can, after consuming a power-up, cannibalize rival Pacs-Mans until you are the last Pac-Man standing.

Other power-ups let you freeze opponents, increase your speed, temporarily shield yourself from harm, and so on. In the traditional battle royale style, mazes vanish from the edge of the map over time, forcing players to tunnel into each other's homes to consume their flesh. Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle will continue the other grand tradition of battle royales by offering cosmetics so that you can give your Pac-Man a silly hat or a pair of glasses or whatever.

Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs will be coming to Steam on May 8, with cross-platformer multiplayer so we can compete with our friends on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.

When PCG's Joshua Wolens and I were looking for something to play recently, going back, we assumed, was going to be like slipping into an old pair of well-worn shoes. What a surprise it was, then, to find that the game is almost nothing like it was back in 2017-18. 

While the PUBG Guy, the game's unofficial mascot, remains part of the cover art—complete with a button-up shirt and Spetznaz helmet—he is one of the few relics of an older era. Where once the servers were full of characters that looked like him, it's now full of people wearing skins that wouldn't look out of place in Fortnite. Take the Battle Bunny set, which, when previewed, blasts Kpop (I think, don't come for me Kpop stans) through your headphones. If that's not for you, how about a dog-themed onesie or a KFC set, complete with bucket hat, because of course.

I'm not one to complain about weird skins in games—I enthusiastically played Modern Warfare 2 as Snoop Dogg, and will likely end up buying the Cheech and Chong packs at some point—but it's quite the shock to the system. When you load into a match at the time of writing, you're also encouraged to lob cupcakes at a huge present, which opens to reveal a music box that then plays Happy Birthday to celebrate PUBG's seventh anniversary. 

The big change in tone is down to two things: the game's popularity in Asia and Fortniteification. If you didn't know, PUBG is massive in Asia, particularly China, and has been since at least 2018. Due to Chinese government regulations, PUBG has its own version there called Peacekeeper Elite, but enterprising Chinese players can (and do) still play PUBG with VPNs. This leads to the interesting situation where a game that once felt rooted in the grand tradition of Eastern European eurojank now bases its aesthetic around a more international feel, particularly with regard to Asian settings, which feel noticeably lacking in mainstream multiplayer shooters. A number of maps now feature biomes resembling countries in East and Southeast Asia—including the massive Rondo, there are three of them. The vibe has changed significantly since the era of PUBG being solely set in Eastern Europe or Central America.

As well as trying to appeal to its substantial audience in Asia, it's been taking cues from its main competition. PUBG might have been first, but Fortnite took the genre to new heights. Fortnite was shut down in China back in 2021 and has never managed to reach the levels of popularity in the rest of Asia as it has in the west, but it established a blueprint that elevated it beyond a game and into a phenomenon. Chasing the Fortnite dollar, then, makes a lot of sense. While it might be lacking the same wealth of licensed characters as Fortnite, PUBG's wacky and strange skins (catch me in Erangel in sailor suit pants and a demon mask) still offer players a lot of silliness. It's a world away from my experiences back in the day, where lootboxes netted me the overwhelming joy of a striped polo shirt and some black trousers.

Another advantage Fortnite had over PUBG was the lack of a price of entry. Back in 2022, however, PUBG made the shift to free to play, and as a result the modern game now really pushes its microtransactions and commercial tie-ins. Where once players had to be content driving around in jeeps and rust buckets, last year PUBG put players behind the wheel of an Aston Martin roadster and SUV—for a price. 

It's a weird place for a game to be: it looks intensely commercial while retaining the gameplay grittiness of its 2017 release, as well as some aspects that feel entirely unfriendly to new players, such as being able to manually zero sights to different ranges and the cumbersome way that gun attachments work. It still feels like an Arma mod: janky, unfriendly but incredibly unique, with a diehard community who have stuck by it even as more and more battle royales appear. 

Yet underneath all of these aesthetic changes and a shift in audience, the core of PUBG—those tense shootouts and the desperate scramble to be the last player standing—remains as fast and as lethal as ever. You're still jumping from the plane (welcomed by a spread of balloons in the shape of the number 7, part of the anniversary celebrations), landing and scrounging for whatever weaponry you can find, and, nine times out of 10, getting sniped by someone within moments. When you get those runs where you come down to the final 10 players, it's as rewarding and exhilarating as ever, even though the higher population of cheaters can undermine the fun.

So, if you've been away from PUBG for a long time and are thinking of coming back, what should you expect? Visiting the lands of Erangel or Miramar will be like visiting home after decades away: many things have changed, but some things have remained the same. You'll likely end up getting killed in more suspect ways than you used to, though, with some players able to wheel their rifle around to you in milliseconds and blast you with deadly accuracy. Maybe they're just incredible players, but it seems somewhat unlikely. You'll also see a wider range of guns than you used to, plus a much broader in-game store. Yet whatever you think of these changes, you'll find PUBG to be as ruthless, chaotic and silly as ever. You'll still have wild chases in a range of different cars or end up firing wildly out of upstairs windows like a spooked militiaman. It may have changed a whole lot and feel a little uncanny, but there's still plenty of fun to be had in PUBG in 2024—just buckle up for a stranger ride.

Epic Games is removing tiers and rarities from its locker, meaning that cosmetic items will no longer fall into the categories of rare, epic, legendary, and mythic. The blog post says: "The Shop has evolved significantly to support multiple types of cosmetics and items across games, so we’re retiring the old Battle Royale-inspired system of colors and tags for cosmetic quality. Different Series of cosmetics—such as the Icon Series or Gaming Legends Series—will still be there to help you find your favorite stuff!"

Locker rarities were a day one feature, so its removal has sparked some confusion as players are now trying to navigate the locker for skins without the help of colour coding and just relying on alphabetical order. A few players have also spoken out against this change, saying that the rarity system was a good way of keeping skin prices down. 

"I hate this locker UI change, and I think it's in an effort to disassociate rarity and price to make more money from players," SnazzyBlocks says in a Twitter post. "Fortnite is trying to gouge players more and more! With SCUMMY marketing tactics," they continue in a subsequent post. 

Other players have also been discussing this update, with many agreeing that removing locker rarities makes it easier for Epic Games to price skins however it sees fit: "[I] expect Epic to become more aggressive with how they price cosmetics going forward, now that they’re no longer forced to play by established rules for how to price cosmetics," FortNiteBR says in a Reddit thread. 

We've already seen a rise in skin prices over the last few collaborations, and the latest Avatar: The Last Airbender skins are no different. You can buy Zuko or Katara's pack for 2,000 v-bucks each or purchase a combined bundle for 3,200. Compare this to the Goku and Beerus bundle, which also came with four styles and a pickaxe and cost 2,700, or the Frieza and Cell bundle, which was 2,300 v-bucks, and it's clear there's been some kind of price hike. In a Reddit discussion, one user explains that "the new avatar skins are at a price much higher than they should be. [We used to have] a skin for 1,200 v-bucks without a back bling! money and v-bucks don't fall from the sky; value your players epic."

The rising prices for skins and cosmetics also follow a change in the in-game currency's value. Back in September 2023, Epic announced in a statement that it would be making v-bucks more expensive: "We are adjusting the price of V-Bucks, and our real money content Pack offers in Czech Republic, Denmark, Eurozone countries, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States (including all storefronts where the United States Dollar is used) on October 27, 2023. These adjustments are based on economic factors such as inflation and currency fluctuations, and follow similar pricing alignments recently completed in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico." 1,000 v-bucks increased in price from $7.99 to $8.99, which isn't much but will make a dent if you spend enough in-game cash.

However, there are a few people who have pointed out that Epic could already price skins however it wanted to, and rarity did nothing to actively stop this. "When people cite the rarity status as justification for the price, they somehow overlook the fact that the very same company decides the rarity... thereby deciding the price. This change, while making sorting more difficult, is ultimately a more transparent pricing model. The skins cost whatever Epic charges for them," one Reddit user explains in the thread. 

Who knows how Epic will continue to price skins and cosmetics after this update but, regardless of pricing, players are still asking for the locker's UI to be updated. "The UI is missing very core features like allowing wraps and other categories like lobby items to be synced with your character presets," ScyanYT explains in a tweet. "The UI doesn’t even work well and is beyond buggy; it's so frustrating to go through."

In a reply that Epic tweeted back in December 2023, it said that players can "expect to see more improvements and design evolution rolled out over the next few updates," yet there hasn't been much change other than the rarities rework. And with no further mention of it in the recent blog post, players will still have to wait to see what's in store for them and their precious loot.

It all started earlier today when Respawn made note of all the reports: "We've rolled out an update to address this issue. Any account logging in now will not experience any lost progress or content," says the Respawn Twitter account. "For players who are missing progress or content after our update this morning—please hang tight for now. We're working on an additional fix to restore your accounts to their state before our update, and we'll let you know as soon as it's ready."

Things may have been safe for players who entered Apex Legends after this bug was found, but those who logged in straight after the update saw their accounts royally messed with. One player, Bangaloaf, uploaded a screenshot to the Apex Legends subreddit showing how all their stats were erased. Other players explained in the comments how accounts lost around 100 levels or a few seasons' worth of content. 

"My game was running when the split reset; my account had gone down to level 1, so I restarted, assuming it was a small bug," EducationalWorld2149 explains. "When I opened the game up, it forced me into the cross-progression prompt where I saw I was over 100 levels less, and when loading in, I lost a bunch of progress/skins/apex coins/bp." 

To resolve all of this mess, Respawn decided to take the Apex Legends servers offline: "We messed up! We are deploying a fast fix to restore progress and content to affected accounts, but players will not be able to connect to the game during this time." The servers are back up and running now, so you can carry on playing without the worry of losing all your hard-earned levels. 

But Respawn is still figuring out how to restore all the progress players made over the last day or so, which will likely be the next task to check off its list now servers are back up. This fix has also meant that the new Ranked Split has been postponed for now. All we know so far is that it will have to be rolled out at a later date, according to Respawn. 

Easy Anti-Cheat got out of the gate before EA and Respawn, but the Apex developer has finally commented on the incident. Not that it's saying much.

"On Sunday, a few professional Apex Legends player accounts were hacked during an ALGS event, " says a Respawn statement. "Game and player security are our highest priorities, which is why we paused the competition to address the issue immediately.

"Our teams have deployed the first of a layered series of updates to protect the Apex Legends player community and create a secure experience for everyone."

Well, that's all as clear as mud.

To give a brief summary of what went down, during the third match of the day player Noyan "Genburten" Ozkose of DarkZero suddenly found themselves using a wallhack and was able to see every other player. Ozkose dropped out of the match, fearing their team would be penalised. In the next match, Phillip "ImperialHal" Dosen of TSM was unexpectedly and unintentionally equipped with an aimbot. That match was abandoned, and the event was called off until further notice "due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised."

The official Apex esports account re-posted Respawn's message, adding that: "At this time, we do not anticipate any changes to the Split 1 Playoffs. We will have more information to share on the Challenger Circuit and the NA Regional Finals soon. We appreciate your patience."

The caginess on EA and Respawn's part is down to the implications of an RCE exploit, which can be disastrous and lead to an attacker basically running whatever they like on the victim's hardware. Rockstar was forced to swiftly address a potential exploit in GTA Online last year, while in 2022 the entire Dark Souls series lost its PvP servers for nine months. 

Conversely, this is why Easy Anti-Cheat's been so strong out of the gate in reponse to the hack—before this it hadn't tweeted since 2019. A game having an RCE exploit is one thing, but if EAC was the vector then all the other games it's used in could be potential targets (among them Fortnite and Elden Ring). 

Apex Legends publisher EA has yet to comment on the attack. I've contacted both EA and Respawn for comment and will update with any response.

The first hack, against Noyan "Genburten" Ozkose of DarkZero, took place during the third match of the day: He was suddenly able to see every other player on the map, even through walls, and was ultimately forced to drop out of the match, although his teammates managed to claim second place even though they were a man down. The second hack occurred in the next match: Phillip "ImperialHal" Dosen of TSM suddenly found himself saddled with an aimbot. That match was ultimately abandoned, and the North American finals were postponed "due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised."

Shortly afterward, the Anti-Cheat Police Department, a volunteer group that specializes in "gathering intelligence on cheats to detect and disrupt cheating vendors," issued a statement saying that an RCE (remote code execution) was being abused in the game, and that it was unclear "whether it comes from the game or the actual anti-cheat (software)."

Remote code execution exploits enable attackers to run software on remote machines, and they are bad news: An RCE was responsible for the suspension of PC PvP servers for Dark Souls games in 2022. A similar vulnerability was discovered in GTA Online in 2023. 

In this case, as Anti-Cheat PD put it, "the RCE is being abused to inject cheats into streamers machines, which means they have the capabilities to do whatever, like installing ransomware software locking up your entire PC."

How this attack happened still isn't known, but earlier today Easy Anti-Cheat issued a statement disavowing responsibility. "We have investigated recent reports of a potential RCE issue within Easy Anti-Cheat," it tweeted. "At this time—we are confident that there is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited. We will continue to work closely with our partners for any follow up support needed."

Making the statement even more notable is the fact that it's the first time Easy Anti-Cheat has tweeted since May 2019. Clearly the company considers it an important issue, and for good reason: Rooting out where the vulnerability lies—in Easy Anti-Cheat or Apex Legends itself—is hugely important, as it could determine whether this RCE is contained to one game or potentially deployable in other games that use EAC, such as Fortnite, War Thunder, Lost Ark, Elden Ring, and Hunt: Showdown, to name a few.

Epic Online Services later confirmed the statement in a separate tweet. (Epic Games acquired Easy Anti-Cheat in 2018.)

Reacting to EAC's tweet, Anti-Cheat PD said it indicates the issue lies within the Source engine itself, which Apex Legends uses, and that it could be similar to a vulnerability detailed in 2021.

Respawn has yet to comment on the hack, so the big questions—how did this happen, and what's the risk of playing Apex Legends?—remain unanswered. There's also no indication at this point when the North American finals of the ALGS will resume, but it's fair to assume that it's not going to happen until Respawn is confident the game is secured. I've reached out to EA for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

The Apex Legends Global Series is currently in regional finals mode, but the North America finals have been delayed after two players were hacked mid-match. First, Noyan "Genburten" Ozkose of DarkZero suddenly found himself able to see other players through walls, then Phillip "ImperialHal" Dosen of TSM was given an aimbot. 

Genburten's hack happened part of the way through the day's third match. A Twitch clip of the moment shows the words "Apex hacking global series by Destroyer2009 & R4ndom" repeating over chat as he realizes he's been given a cheat and takes his hands off the controls. "I can see everyone!" he says, before leaving the match.

ImperialHal was hacked in the game immediately after that. "I have aimbot right now!" he shouts in a clip of the moment, before declaring "I can't shoot." Though he continued attempting to play out the round, the match was later abandoned. 

The volunteers at the Anti-Cheat Police Department have since issued a PSA announcing, "There is currently an RCE exploit being abused in [Apex Legends]" and that it could be delivered via from the game itself, or its anti-cheat protection. "I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles", they went on to say.

As for players of the tournament, they strongly recommended taking protective measures. "It is advisable that you change your Discord passwords and ensure that your emails are secure. also enable MFA for all your accounts if you have not done it yet", they said, "perform a clean OS reinstall as soon as possible. Do not take any chances with your personal information, your PC may have been exposed to a rootkit or other malicious software that could cause further damage."

The rest of the series has now been postponed, "Due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised," as the official Twitter account announced. They finished by saying, "We will share more information soon." 

Krafton's latest 2024 roadmap video includes a host of announced changes, including the very exciting possibility that you'll be able to dig a hole. Maybe. As part of a plan to introduce "vibrant gameplay experiences", which I assume are preferable to dull gameplay experiences, Krafton says that destructible environments are coming to PUBG.

"This year, we aim to introduce a 'destructible area'. The idea began with the thought that an interactive world could open up a wider range of strategies and tactics," a Krafton dev says, using the example of breaking open a door and chucking a grenade through it. A video plays of a chicken-dinner hopeful digging a small hole with a pickaxe. However, "discussions are still ongoing in various aspects," and while Krafton says the update will be coming in April, it'll only be "to some extent." 

Other exciting notes include gunplay adjustments (with public testing) every two months, "action-oriented" features including a potential zipline, new game modes, better bots, improved matchmaking, and—most excitingly—user-generated content (UGC), alongside an upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.

"We are preparing an UGC mod to grant a high level of freedom to users … our goal is to ensure PUBG remains loved for so long by providing an environment where you can create your own world according to your rules." 

Krafton also dedicated a substantial portion of its update to addressing how it'll be handling cheaters, following its deployment of AI models to help cut rulebreakers off at the source last year—it claims that the "situation has been stabilised now", though it admits that its new anti-killjoy tech still has "significant room for further enhancement, as the number of cheaters is still substantial." While Krafton's focus has been on the game's ranked mode, it intends to extend the (soon-to-be-longer) arm of the law to other modes as well.

Fortnite Chapter 5 Season 2 was supposed to go live today, and it still might, but if you're waiting eagerly to jump back into the game you'll likely have noticed that it hasn't happened yet. And it won't for a while: Epic said it ran into an "unexpected issue" during downtime, and it seems to be having problems getting it fixed.

Word of the problems first came to light earlier today. "Hey everyone, we encountered an unexpected issue during our maintenance and we need to extend downtime at least 8 additional hours," Epic's Fortnite Status account tweeted. "We apologize for making everyone wait longer than usual to drop into Chapter 5 Season 2 of Battle Royale. The team is working through this as quickly as possible, and we’ll provide another update when we have more info."

Seven hours into that eight-hour stretch, another update said work was continuing, but more time was required: "Players will be able to pre-download an updated version of v29.00 in approximately 5 hours," Epic tweeted.

That puts the target time at roughly 9 pm ET, but to my reading that doesn't necessarily mean the game will be live at that point—only that players will be able to get the update ahead of its return.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney took a moment to tweet a little joke about situation:

A few followers took issue with the tweet, suggesting that Sweeney wasn't treating the situation with an appropriate level of seriousness, but for the most part people seem to be rolling with it in good nature. Some players on Reddit expressed relief that Epic caught the problem now, rather than after the update went fully live; one mused philosophically, "Maybe Chapter 5, Season 2 was the friends we made along the way."

Of course, there are some real victims here too:

The nature of the problem isn't known at this point, but it's clearly a significant issue: Lengthy downtimes leading up to the launch of new seasons is nothing new, but double-extended delays like this are a rarity. Hopefully Epic will be able to meet the latest deadline, but even if it does, it's fair to say that some players are going to have to wait until tomorrow before they get back into the action.

The festival pass is upgraded by completing festival quests, and of course the most Gaga items are reserved for the premium track (there is also a free tier of rewards), including the song Poker Face. The premium pass costs 1800 V-bucks and ultimately lets players unlock the Enigmatic Gaga Outfit, which it says here is "an iconic Lady Gaga ensemble from her Chromatica Ball stadium tour, including a purple bodysuit designed by celebrity designer Nange Magro of Dead Lotus Couture."

The premium pass is also where the real musical goodies are found, with four unlockable tracks: 

• Nelly ft. City Spud: Ride Wit Me
• Soundgarden: Black Hole Sun
• Topic w/ A7S: Breaking Me
• Lady Gaga: Poker Face

So there you go. There's also plenty of stuff sold separately in the shop themed around the 2020 album Chromatica, Gaga's most recent solo album, so players can buy the Chromatica Armor Outfit, a "full black leather bodysuit", which accompanies the Chromatica Bass, Chromatica Mic, Stupid Love Jam Track, and Rain Check Emote. Being a little monster is an expensive business.

The free jam tracks include two, 8-Bit Beat and Best Buds, that had previously been sold in the store, and any players who'd bought them before this season began will be refunded their V-bucks.

There's a whole bunch of minor fixes and improvements alongside the new season, though Epic's main focus seems to have been on the (relatively new) music element of Fortnite, with improvements to the music library's usability and players now able to use jam loops in more settings.

There does seem to have been one condition of the deal though. Gaga is famous to the degree that pretty much everything she does is news, and when she caught wind of Fortnite took to Twitter in 2019 to ask her followers "what’s fortnight". That has 216K retweets. So obviously, as Epic was agreeing to pay her oodles of cash for this, someone politely requested she correct the error. Thus:

Fortnite's festival mode released late last year, and Mollie reckoned it was the best rhythm game she'd played all year. That's perhaps not surprising, given it was developed by the now Epic-owned Harmonix (Guitar Hero, Rock Band), but it shows that Fortnite's critical mass is sustaining this thing way beyond what anyone expected. It's easy to scoff at the idea this is a metaverse or a platform, but perhaps the most telling thing is that, seven years after release, it's harder than ever to tell what kind of game this is.

Headed by Kris Kwok—whose childhood was spent surrounded by mech model kits, anime and video games—Amazing Seasun Games has spent the past eight years bringing this heartfelt shot at the mecha genre to life. While a lot of that time involved deep exploration and research into the genre itself, there were of course technical hurdles the team had to face. And face them they did.

Throughout development, the Amazing Seasun Games team had several notable technical breakthroughs that allowed them to reach the level of visual fidelity they're touting in the latest Mecha BREAK trailer. Their Virtual Geometry technique, for example, is a graphical solution the game's engine team came up with that made it possible to only render the models that are visible. With it, the software auto-generates low poly models depending on how far they are from view. It's sort of like LOD mapping, but uniquely tailored for the Amazing Seasun Games studio's engine.

Aside from that, the game is built around a "Blitz, Brawl, Blaze" mecha experience. That's the phrase the studio uses to highlight their mechs' speed, the "collision of their steel bodies", and the white-hot intensity they exude in battle. And they're not wrong. Checking out the trailer, it's plain to see that the movement is clean and swift, the gameplay is hectic as you like, and the incredibly detailed models really send the sparks flying when these titans clash.

Coming up with these intricate mech designs that bow to the "golden age of science fiction", the studio collaborated with "legendary Japanese artists who have been involved in mech design since the 1990s". And considering how detailed the game's models are, it's difficult to imagine that the 3D designers were at first lacking in industrial and hard surface design experience.

It's not just the models that have an innovative air about them. The world itself comes with some interesting worldbuilding ideas, such as the fuel known as Eruptive Inorganic Carbide (EIC). It's this highly sought-after "combination of energy and intelligence" that the mechs run on, and many a battle has yet to be fought over it.

Right now Mecha BREAK is multiplayer PvP, but there will soon be a PvEvP mode making its way into the game called Mashmak and it'll contain one of the most massive battlefields in the history of gaming. This is one classy looking, technically innovative addition to the genre, with heaps of passion backing it up. Stay tuned for updates, and wishlist Mecha BREAK now on Steam to show your support for fellow mech-heads out there making their dreams a reality. 

The man was first indicted in November 2018, which is when he claimed to be a conscientious objector who would not enlist due to his personal stance against violence and war. In South Korea there are very occasional exemptions for cultural icons and elite athletes but otherwise little tolerance towards those who wish to avoid the draft, to the extent that even global megastars like BTS are currently doing their service.

With that context, it's not especially surprising that the court had little sympathy for the man's claims of being a conscientious objector. But what's eyebrow-raising is the logic it uses to get there. 

"The defendant has not put any effort into spreading or realizing what he says is his ideological belief, such as working at an NGO related to anti-violence, anti-war, or peace," reads the court's verdict. It further noted that there was no evidence of such behaviour before he was drafted, either. But here we go:

"The defendant admitted that he frequently enjoyed playing the game 'Battlegrounds' which is about killing characters with guns in a virtual reality," reads the judgement. "The video game is different from reality. But the fact that the defendant—who says he is rejecting military service based on his personal opposition to violence and war—enjoys such a game makes the court question whether his conscientious objection is authentic."

There were other factors cited by the court, including that the man claimed the military disregards human rights and issues "rampant unfair orders" to its troops. It said neither of these issues were intrinsic to military training and circumstances varied depending on which service and which era an individual served in.

I suppose the court at least admits games are different from reality, but this nevertheless feels like far too straight a line between enjoyment of violence in entertainment and willingness to commit actual violence. It's perfectly possible to be a conscientious objector and interested in the history and nature of warfare. 

Season 20 is likely to mark another era with the arrival of legend upgrades—a new mid-match progression system that adds four unique abilities to all 30 legends. Upgrades are by leveling up your legend, which goes hand-in-hand with an overhaul to Evo Shields arriving at the same time. Here's how it works:

• Level 1 (gray shield): No upgrade
• Level 2 (blue shield): Choose upgrade 1
• Level 3 (purple shield): Choose upgrade 2
• Level 4 (red shield): No upgrade

What upgrades do can vary wildly from legend to legend. Some are hugely impactful—one of Lifeline's upgrades gives her the ability to self-revive—but others are more straightforward buffs to their ultimates or tactical abilities. I played a few hours of Season 20 at an Apex media summit in Los Angeles last month and saw some similar upgrades: the choice between an enhanced version of your tactical ability or another "charge" for your tactical ability seemed common at level 2. In a presentation from legend designer John Larson, we saw a Wattson upgrade that grants her a second Interception Pylon and a Gibralltor upgrade that augments his bubble shield to be smaller with a shorter cooldown.

In a group interview, Larson said the goal of legend upgrades is to add variety to how every legend can be played and enable playstyles that weren't previously possible.

"From the get go, we wanted to make sure that each legend and their suite of upgrades stays true to the theming and playstyle of the legend," he said, "so that experts who like to main characters as well as people with curiosities about different characters feel empowered to dive in and experiment."

In a separate group interview, lead game designer Devan McGuire shared his excitement for players to get their hands on legend upgrades.

"I'm really keen to see people fall in love with their legends and explore new depth with them by choosing upgrade paths."

McGuire reckons the new upgrade paths will inspire some players to try out legends they don't like and discover ways to make them viable, or return to old mains with a new light. Upgrades will surely have an impact on Apex's competitive scene. At four total upgrades per legend, that's 120 new variables for players to account for. In several cases where an upgrade modifies the expected behavior of an ability, Respawn says it has added a distinct visual or sound to indicate it.

Apex Legends Season 20 begins this month with legend upgrades, Evo Shield changes, ranked updates, and a new limited-time mode called Straight Shot.

The biggest target for Season 20 is shields. Shields in Apex Legends will no longer spawn as ground loot. Everyone begins the match with the same gray shield, and the only ways to upgrade a shield is by dealing damage, finding EVO harvesters on the map, or performing "class actions" that benefit your squad.

In an interview with PC Gamer at an Apex Legends media summit in Los Angeles, lead battle royale designer Josh Mohan said the idea is to  "smooth out" the progression of an Apex match and make matchups more predictable.

"Part of the battle royale core is the randomness of it. It's kind of like a roguelike game. You play with the hand you're dealt and see what you get," he said. "Which is a tricky balance in a competitive environment that can sometimes make you feel like, 'Well they picked up a purple shield and I didn't get anything, so that was just a waste of my time there.'

"It can feel like a bit of a non-game."

By flattening the shield curve, Mohan says Apex now has "a really distinct early, middle, and late game period" where can roughly know what power level enemies are at before engaging. If it's early on, you can comfortably engage a squad knowing nobody's packing a fully-upgraded red shield.

Along with the removal of ground shields is the introduction of new ways to upgrade a shield. Dealing lots of damage remains the quickest avenue to upgrades, but new EVO harvesters marked on the map can also get the job done if you're up for the jog. Two or three harvesters give enough EVO to upgrade a whole squad's shields, and lead game designer Devan McGuire said harvesters are intentionally placed between compounds so squads can easily grab them on the way to loot. The other way to get ahead in shields is role-specific actions like opening a support loot bin or revealing the next circle.

Shield swapping—the practice of quickly replacing your depleted shield with a dead enemy's shield that Mohan called "a core part of our combat"—is still possible, but works differently. You can still loot shields off dead players, but any upgrade you get from their shield isn't permanent. If you have a blue shield and loot an enemy's purple shield core, for example, you'd absorb their extra pip of shield as temporary HP. Essentially, your shield is always your shield, but you can charge (or overcharge) its battery.

Mohan told PC Gamer that the team didn't come to this change lightly.

"It changes the whole mathematics of the game, which took us internally a while to get our heads around," Mohan said. "Believe me, there were grumblings all over the place about whether this was the right change or not. But the proof is in the pudding. As we started to play it more and more, it just felt like the right move."

"My hesitation or where I stay up late at night is wondering how long it will take for folks to see the armor progression system as a healthy thing," said McGuire in a separate group interview with press.

In the same group interview, Mohan expanded on the loss of armor as ground loot.

"I think [players] will miss that feeling of grabbing a purple shield off the rip and feeling like you just got dealt pocket aces, but I think in the long run, people will see that it's healthy change to the armor system specifically."

Apex's new shield dynamic goes hand-in-hand with another major Season 20 addition: legend upgrades. Every legend now has a mini skill-tree they can level up throughout each match with the same EVO progression tied to shields. It's a big deal, so much that it needs its own article to cover.

While Respawn has taken luck out of the equation when it comes to your health pool, don't expect the same to happen for weapons. 

"[Season 20] is an evolution in the right direction, toward where we need to be with our health pool items like shields. With weapons, I think it's a bit different," Mohan said."You can still have that randomness with weapons, because it's a fun challenge to feel like the more of the weapon roster you know, the more successful you're going to be.

"And sometimes you get that feeling of 'Oh I got the best attachment for this weapon. I'm going to switch to it even though it's not my favorite.' That dynamic is still really interesting. We might hone it a bit, but I don't see us fully getting rid of that level of randomness in the game."

While Mohan said the team will "probably look at" other instances of randomness in Apex, leveling out health pools was the priority. In the spirit of a level playing field, I asked Mohan if Respawn would ever revisit the idea of every player spawning equipped with a gun. In short: probably not.

"The thing about putting a weapon directly into the players' hands is it creates this 'uber hot dropping' behavior. Like, I'm gonna drop right on top of you and just delete you from the game instantly."

Apex Legends Season 20 begins this month with the shields overhaul, legend upgrades, and a new limited-time version of battle royale called Straight Shot that cuts match times in half.

This is the latest stage in a global faceoff between Apple and Epic as the Fortnite developer (and platform holder) battles to open up the walled garden that is iOS. Epic's attempts in the US mainly ended in failure, but in the EU it's a different story and the DMA means Apple must allow customers to access thirdparty app stores and payment methods. The DMA is not just about Apple but all large tech companies that act as gatekeepers to online services, and aims to make it easier for companies to compete on large storefronts without having to jump through hoops that solely benefit the platform-holder. 

Epic has used Fortnite symbolically throughout this fight, withdrawing it from the App Store in 2020 (with an advert parodying Apple's classic 1984 commercial). In its various actions Epic has argued that Apple operates an anti-competitive monopoly that gives developers and players no choice but to go through iOS and cough up 30% commission. 

For its part, Apple has announced how it intends to comply with the provisions of the DMA and the chutzpah is kind of amazing: among other things it is demanding install fees above a certain number of users, and that developers wishing to use their own payment services provide a stonking proof of credit. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games and a man never shy of sharing his opinions, is positively fulminating at what looks like a bad faith attempt to skirt the EU's demands.

"Apple's plan to thwart Europe's new Digital Markets Act law is a devious new instance of Malicious Compliance," thunders Sweeney. "They are forcing developers to choose between App Store exclusivity and the store terms, which will be illegal under DMA, or accept a new also-illegal anticompetitive scheme rife with new Junk Fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don't process."

Sweeney is referring here to a new developer charge of $0.50 for every install an app has above the one million mark: even if that app is free to the end user. He says Apple's "twisting this process to undermine competition and continue imposing Apple taxes on transactions they're not involved in.

"There's a lot more hot garbage in Apple's announcement. It will take more time to parse both the written and unwritten parts of this new horror show, so stay tuned."

Sweeney is not alone in his incredulity at what Apple is proposing here. A particular bone of contention is the requirement that, if you wish to process payments via a thirdparty store on iOS, you'll first have to provide a €1,000,000 letter of credit, which obviously precludes the vast majority of developers from ever doing so. Incidentally this led to a rather sweet anecdote from Sweeney, who recalled that "Epic was founded with a few thousands dollars in funds that I earned through mowing lawns" and such rules would obviously stop this kind of startup from competing in any meaningful way.

"Under what possible theory of antitrust regulation is it acceptable for a monopoly to decide what companies are allowed to compete with it, and on what terms they can compete," asks Sweeney. "Apple makes a mockery of free market competition."

The plan, called Operation: Belong, was revealed last week in a rousing video showcasing a custom-made map that would serve as a battleground for influencers Yung Filly and Elz the Witch. All evidence of the video has since been deleted but the intent, to me, seemed pretty clear: "You there, youngster! Join the army!"

Text messages laid atop Fortnite gameplay drove the point home: "You belong here. Work as one. Test your agility. Unlock the enigma. Conquer obstacles. Apply your training."

If you recall how things went when the US Army tried its hand at livestreaming (hint: not well), you can imagine what the reaction to the British Army's foray into Fortnite was like. Multiple comments on social media called it "wild Black Mirror shit," "vile," "immoral," "sick in the head," and other such things. Predictably, one person asked the British Army Jobs Twitter account, which had tweeted about the Fortnite plan, what its favorite war crime is. The army chose not to respond.

Epic Games declined to comment on the army-made map except to say that it was currently undergoing the standard moderation process. That could've proven tricky—among other things, Epic's rules say commercial content and sponsors must not "promote enrolment in the military"—but it's now a moot point, as the whole thing has been called off.

The British Army told PC Gamer that the map and livestreamed competition was merely intended to raise awareness of the military's role and values, and that it was not intended for children: The influencers taking part in the program have audiences that are largely 18 or older, and the army had also planned to incorporate an 18+ age restriction to watch the stream. The map itself was not intended for public release, but was designed specifically for a one-off livestream.

Despite that defense, the army surely knows there are an awful lot of gamers out there, many of them young, and they represent a very fertile field of potential recruits. Encouraging signups through gaming is nothing new: America's Army is the first and most famous example, and in more recent years the US Army has sent recruiters to major esports tournaments and sponsored "esports labs" for US high schools. 

More pointedly (I mean, really on the nose here), the US Army founded its own official esports team which operates as part of the US Army Recruiting Command. The army has scaled back its public-facing gaming gaming operations somewhat in more recent years: It's been two years since the army last streamed on Twitch, but it's still out there, scrounging for engagement and/or approval:

In light of the blowback to the US Army's effort to go whole-hog into gaming, I'm a little surprised that the British would decide to do essentially the same thing. Did no one see this coming? I can understand the urge to rehabilitate the military's image, but Fortniting it up amidst rising global tensions and open military conflict is perhaps not the most well-advised approach to take. It's especially bizarre given that the Army is supposed to be, y'know, really good at strategy and stuff.

Just like their counterparts in the US, the British Army has been struggling to meet its recruitment goals in recent years. A January UK Defence Journal report says the Army hasn't met its annual recruitment targets since 2010. Perhaps this was just a case of necessity being the mother of bad ideas.

But somehow, Seth MacFarlane had never heard of it. As discovered by IGN on the premiere of the Ted TV series (debuting on Peacock), MacFarlane did not know what Fortnite was when he was approached.

"I had to have somebody explain to me what the fuck Fortnite is," MacFarlane says—like a man discovering the McDonalds of an alien planet. "And then I said 'well that sounds kinda cool! Yeah, why not, let's do it.' That's a lot of what my career is, somebody explaining to me: 'how about this' and I say 'what's that?'"

I decided to absolutely decimate my YouTube recommendations for the foreseeable future by looking up whether Family Guy has made a Fortnite joke and, sure enough, there've been a couple of throwaway gags, one where Stewie says he's going to watch the older boys play Fortnite in an electronics store—and another where Joe says he "levelled up in Fortnite", which does sound like something someone who doesn't play Fortnite would say.

Granted, Seth MacFarlane doesn't write every episode of Family Guy—nobody deserves that—and the show itself occupies the territory of 'must reference current thing'. I completely believe him when he says the game passed him by. His admirable ambivalence to battle royales also manifests when he talks about Peter's muscular physique: "I was told that they didn't have the budget to create his actual body". 

Not to detract from the character's size, but the issue probably lies less with the rendering of Peter Griffin and more with how much the game's standard moveset would prove a clipping nightmare for his body. No developer team is going to create a whole set of new animations for one character, not even for Peter Griffin Fortnite.

Still, this is a pretty good measuring stick of how popular the game has become. While you might think snagging the licence to use a character in a game is hard—and you'd be right—it's staggering that Epic Games were able to approach MacFarlane and get him to agree to using one of his most recognisable characters, despite him having zero investment in the game whatsoever. Luckily, there is now a Family Guy.